As a company proprietor for over a decade, I count on software and automation to enhance procedures and supply outcomes. So when GoHighLevel arised on the scene few years back, it certainly caught my interest GoHighLevel For SaaS.
The concept was enticing– an all-in-one client management platform with marketing, sales, and service tools integrated with each other. As a business owner always aiming to streamline and scale my business, it seemed like a dream happened on paper. Who would not desire a solitary service that does it all?
However in this thorough GoHighLevel evaluation, I’ll take you inside my devastating trip of attempting (and falling short) to change to this popular brand-new software. You’ll learn:
If you’re thinking about whether GoHighLevel is right for your very own service requirements, ideally you can learn from my agonizing mistakes and inflated expectations.
Looter: I do NOT suggest GoHighLevel. If you need a CRM, begin with this checklist of ideal CRMs instead. I make use of Keap.
Some GoHighLevel Alternatives
If you’re searching for a sales, marketing, and task administration alternative to GoHighLevel, after that below are a couple of we advise.
Backstory: Why I Took Into Consideration Changing from Keap
To comprehend what attracted me to GoHighLevel to begin with, you require context about my previous configuration. For over 5 years I had been happily relying on Keap (previously Infusionsoft) to satisfy all my customer monitoring and automation demands.
I found Keap instinctive to make use of and it dealt with every little thing I required– CRM, email marketing, sales funnels, membership sites, and client support.
Keap’s CRM and sales and marketing automation are created to aid small businesses maintain their customers while including brand-new ones easily. Automate follow-ups with emails and messages, guaranteeing leads and clients obtain the ideal messages at the right time. Usage website and social networks forms to improve lead follow-up, and handle your development with simple appointment organizing and lead tracking. Boost sales with automated pricing quote, invoicing, and repayment handling, liberating your time. With Keap, small businesses can save 10 hours weekly and boost income by 39%. Beginning with a 14-day free trial, no charge card called for.
Why we like Keap
Keap provides a thorough customer relationship monitoring (CRM) and marketing automation solution customized for small businesses and business owners. We value Keap’s focus on streamlining sales procedures and supporting consumer relationships via powerful automation tools. The platform’s all-in-one strategy incorporates CRM, email marketing, invoicing, and task administration, making it especially appealing for organizations seeking to consolidate their tech pile.
Generally, it simply worked dependably with minimal difficulty or maintenance called for. My open and click-through prices were wonderful (like 35% fantastic). Automations ran efficiently without any issues.
So why on earth was I tempted to uproot my whole operational structure from a system that worked to attempt something unproven and untested?
In hindsight I can confess I got attracted by the siren telephone call of “shiny things syndrome”. You recognize the feeling: when every person’s talking about a new tool that will change your service … The yard commonly looks greener beyond, and I questioned whether GoHighLevel might decrease rubbing factors that I would certainly discovered to tolerate over the years with Keap.
I withstood at first, yet a few more disappointments led me to think perhaps it was time for a modification.
The Financial investment: Moving My Firm to GoHighLevel
Earlier this year I determined to start. I enrolled in HighLevel’s Agency plan at $297/month, spending considerably greater than the $97/month starter price.
This had not been a decision I took lightly. I recognized changing platforms was mosting likely to call for moving all my Keap information and basically reconstructing my whole technology infrastructure from square one utilizing every one of the GoHighLevel integrations offered.
Right here’s an overview of simply several of the initiative required:
- By hand exporting 20,000+ e-mail customer documents
- Recreating dozens of automations and workflows
- Relocating client accounts, notes, and task information to the brand-new CRM
- Reconfiguring my Stripe billing integration
- Establishing landing pages, promos, and sales funnels throughout once more
- Learning a totally international UX and user interface layout
All in, I spent around 30-40 laborious hours of configuration work transitioning everything over– not to mention dealing with shed productivity during the switch.
Yet inevitably, it was a calculated financial investment I was willing to make. I figured some temporary discomfort would certainly repay with GoHighLevel providing a much better long-lasting remedy for my business, Dripify. Oh just how incorrect I was …
It just took me about a month of hands-on use to understand I had actually made a huge error. The issues began piling up quickly, until it got to a factor I needed to reduce my losses and switch over back to Keap entirely.
Allow’s walk through the nightmarish problems I came across.
Protection Issues & Many Vermin
Offered GoHighLevel placed itself as an all-in-one automation system, I took care to thoroughly recreate each and every single workflow from my old Keap account.
These included series for onboarding brand-new e-mail customers, onboarding brand-new customers, automating follow-ups for webinar enrollments, sending out occasion pointers, taking care of subscription expiries and a lot more.
Everything seemed to be working penalty … until unexpectedly it had not been. One early morning, I awoke to discover 171 entirely pointless emails had actually been sent to users who ought to NOT have actually obtained them. This occurred three days straight, with a different batch of 160 people each day.
I desperately tried repairing and rebuilding the automation from scratch. But the problem persisted.
When I seriously reached out to their support group, they vaguely asserted “web server problems” were responsible. However this explanation really did not make any kind of sense, given that the errors proceeded happening each early morning like clockwork unassociated to any kind of downtime.
In my mind, this huge failing was entirely inappropriate and just really did not benefit my business. I have countless calls counting on my automated campaigns running smoothly.
So if GoHighLevel was mosting likely to be completely undependable, just how could I leave mission-critical workflows and delicate client information to their technology?
The unintuitive interface just compounded these issues …
Discouraging UX
Coming from Keap where everything was seamless and intuitive, GoHighLevel’s learning contour felt high and challenging.
Easy tasks like editing and enhancing workflows entailed digging through menu systems that were all over the place. Key settings were unexplainably spread in entirely various sections. Relocating in between features felt disjointed or confusing.
I’ll inform you what I imply by talking about their funnel builder as an instance. There were 3 separate setups panels to manage general, specific, and product configurations. Yet for some insane factor, the links to accessibility each of these core setups were spread out on opposite sides of the display. What!?
As somebody who values clean, thoughtful style, this seriously upset me.
It strengthened that GoHighLevel still felt like a work-in-progress instead of a sleek product ready for prime-time usage. Their top priorities seemed concentrated on cramming in every feature under the sun, with inadequate functionality as a second thought.
And talking features, I soon realized the affordable price tag included pricey compromises …
Misleading Pricing GoHighLevel For SaaS
One of GoHighLevel’s biggest marketing factors is the inexpensive cost for access to many features. However I rapidly discovered this low-cost base expense was deceptive.
They nickle-and-dimed users with occasional costs for core capability. Suddenly my bank card declarations had vague $10 fees from GoHighLevel here and there.
As it ended up, you obtain charged whenever you send out an email via their servers. So for high quantity customers, this added up to hundreds of bucks in unanticipated prices.
In between these per-email charges and paying extra for deliverability attachments like Mailgun, my “budget-friendly” GoHighLevel membership wound up setting you back dramatically greater than my Keap plan.
The low sticker price was appealing, but just not reasonable in practice. This bait-and-switch left a bad taste in my mouth.
Email Rates Suffered
The last dealbreaker was seeing my very carefully nurtured email open prices plunge nearly over night after changing to GoHighLevel.
Formerly, my target market engagement regularly hit 35-40% open rates in Keap month after month. Once I moved their records over to GoHighLevel, efficiency tanked promptly to a pathetic 9% open price.
Despite how much I optimized my sending out practices or attempted every fixing technique, I can hardly push open rates back right into the teens– still a 50%+ decrease from my previous benchmarks GoHighLevel For SaaS.
Let me repeat: my exact same target market and e-mails suddenly had terrible interaction. The only thing I could assume that would be causing this was whatever was happening behind the scenes at GoHighLevel. For a company so dependent on e-mail marketing, this was a big deal.
In between the crippling deliverability issues, hidden costs, busted features, and terrible user interface, I had actually lastly reached my limit …
Why I Quit GoHighLevel after 37 Days
Simply 45 days after migrating my company to GoHighLevel, I recognized I had actually made a big error. The cons drastically exceeded any type of advantages.
No software program is perfect, however the large volume of issues was beyond appropriate.
At the end of the day, software program boils down to count on. If I can’t trust it to handle essential features properly or believe a vendor has my best interests in mind, then it’s time to walk away– even after spending considerable time, money, and effort migrating.
So I made the difficult call to turn around course and return back to Keap completely just weeks after going all in on GoHighLevel. Allow’s discover what I gained from this debacle.
Key Takeaways: What I Picked up from My GoHighLevel Mistake
My time with HighLevel can be summarized as a pricey ill fortune. But in knowledge, it instructed me a few crucial lessons:
- Stick to what works. Do not upset what’s working unless something is definitively much better across the board. Modification brings danger.
- Veterinarian asserts extensively. Marketing hype around new software program frequently obscures larger underlying flaws. Deep due persistance is necessary.
- Select simpleness over features. Properly designed devices should make your job life much easier, not more complicated and unpleasant.
- Transparency constructs count on. Nontransparent pricing, shady reseller terms, and finger-pointing to escape troubles damages count on.
- Look for objective testimonials. Pleased assistance examines imply much less if excessive concerns indicate bad overall use.
- Perfection is impossible. No single remedy can completely meet every one-of-a-kind company requirement. Locate the least-bad fit.
- Advancement over transformation. Incremental enhancements commonly outweigh dangerous wholesale reinvention of what already works fine.
In other words, I found out to be extra unconvinced of “as well great to be true” marketing claims and much less attracted by the appeal of glossy new objects. The devices you make use of daily should make count on via openness and efficiency, not slick advertising.