As a company proprietor for over a years, I depend on software application and automation to improve procedures and supply outcomes. So when GoHighLevel arised on the scene couple of years back, it most definitely caught my attention GoHighLevel LevelUp Summit.
The idea was appealing– an all-in-one client management platform with marketing, sales, and solution tools integrated with each other. As a business owner always wanting to simplify and scale my service, it looked like a desire come to life theoretically. Who wouldn’t want a solitary remedy that does it all?
However in this in-depth GoHighLevel testimonial, I’ll take you inside my devastating trip of trying (and falling short) to switch to this prominent brand-new software program. You’ll discover:
If you’re taking into consideration whether GoHighLevel is right for your very own organization requirements, with any luck you can learn from my excruciating mistakes and pumped up assumptions.
Looter: I do NOT advise GoHighLevel. If you need a CRM, start with this listing of ideal CRMs rather. I make use of Keap.
Some GoHighLevel Alternatives
If you’re trying to find a sales, marketing, and job management alternative to GoHighLevel, after that here are a few we recommend.
Backstory: Why I Considered Switching from Keap
To comprehend what attracted me to GoHighLevel in the first place, you require context about my previous arrangement. For over 5 years I had been happily relying on Keap (formerly Infusionsoft) to satisfy all my client monitoring and automation needs.
I located Keap user-friendly to utilize and it took care of whatever I needed– CRM, email marketing, sales funnels, membership sites, and client support.
Keap’s CRM and sales and marketing automation are made to assist small businesses keep their clients while adding new ones easily. Automate follow-ups with e-mails and texts, ensuring leads and customers get the best messages at the right time. Usage web site and social media types to simplify lead follow-up, and manage your development with very easy consultation scheduling and lead tracking. Boost sales with automated quoting, invoicing, and settlement processing, liberating your time. With Keap, small businesses can conserve 10 hours weekly and rise profits by 39%. Begin with a 14-day free trial, no bank card needed.
Why we like Keap
Keap uses an extensive client partnership monitoring (CRM) and marketing automation service customized for small companies and business owners. We appreciate Keap’s concentrate on enhancing sales procedures and nurturing customer relationships with powerful automation devices. The system’s all-in-one method incorporates CRM, email marketing, invoicing, and task administration, making it especially appealing for services looking to settle their tech stack.
Generally, it simply functioned dependably with marginal difficulty or maintenance required. My open and click-through rates were terrific (like 35% excellent). Automations ran efficiently with no concerns.
So why on earth was I tempted to uproot my whole operational structure from a system that worked to attempt something unverified and untested?
In knowledge I can confess I got attracted by the alarm phone call of “shiny item syndrome”. You know the sensation: when everyone’s talking about a new device that will transform your organization … The grass often looks greener on the other side, and I wondered whether GoHighLevel may minimize rubbing factors that I would certainly found out to endure throughout the years with Keap.
I resisted initially, however a couple of even more disappointments led me to believe possibly it was time for an adjustment.
The Financial investment: Moving My Firm to GoHighLevel
Earlier this year I determined to take the plunge. I registered for HighLevel’s Company plan at $297/month, spending significantly greater than the $97/month starter cost.
This had not been a decision I took lightly. I recognized switching systems was mosting likely to need migrating all my Keap information and essentially restoring my entire technology framework from the ground up utilizing every one of the GoHighLevel integrations available.
Right here’s a review of just several of the effort called for:
- Manually exporting 20,000+ email client records
- Recreating lots of automations and workflows
- Relocating client accounts, notes, and project information to the brand-new CRM
- Reconfiguring my Stripe invoicing integration
- Setting up landing pages, discounts, and sales funnels around again
- Learning a totally foreign UX and interface style
All in, I spent around 30-40 tiresome hours of setup job transitioning whatever over– not to mention dealing with lost performance throughout the button.
However inevitably, it was a computed financial investment I wanted to make. I figured some temporary pain would settle with GoHighLevel giving a much better lasting remedy for my service, Dripify. Oh just how wrong I was …
It just took me concerning a month of hands-on usage to understand I had made a big error. The problems began accumulating quickly, until it reached a factor I had to reduce my losses and switch over back to Keap completely.
Allow’s walk through the horrible problems I ran into.
Safety And Security Issues & Numerous Bugs
Given GoHighLevel positioned itself as an all-in-one automation system, I took care to diligently recreate each and every single workflow from my old Keap account.
These included sequences for onboarding new e-mail customers, onboarding brand-new customers, automating follow-ups for webinar enrollments, sending occasion suggestions, managing subscription expiries and a lot more.
Every little thing appeared to be operating penalty … until suddenly it had not been. One early morning, I awoke to discover 171 completely pointless emails had actually been sent out to customers who should NOT have actually received them. This took place three days in a row, with a various batch of 160 individuals every day.
I frantically tried troubleshooting and restoring the automation from scratch. However the trouble lingered.
When I frantically reached out to their support team, they slightly asserted “web server concerns” were to blame. However this explanation didn’t make any kind of sense, since the errors continued taking place each morning like clockwork unrelated to any kind of downtime.
In my mind, this enormous failure was completely undesirable and simply didn’t help my service. I have countless contacts counting on my automated campaigns running efficiently.
So if GoHighLevel was going to be totally unreliable, how could I turn over mission-critical workflows and sensitive customer information to their innovation?
The unintuitive user interface just worsened these issues …
Discouraging UX
Originating from Keap where every little thing was seamless and intuitive, GoHighLevel’s learning contour really felt steep and difficult.
Basic tasks like editing and enhancing workflows included digging with menu systems that were all over the place. Secret settings were unexplainably scattered in totally different sections. Relocating between functions really felt disjointed or confusing.
I’ll tell you what I suggest by discussing their funnel builder as an example. There were 3 separate settings panels to take care of general, individual, and product configurations. Yet for some crazy factor, the web links to access each of these core setups were expanded on contrary sides of the display. What!?
As somebody who values clean, thoughtful design, this seriously upset me.
It enhanced that GoHighLevel still seemed like a work-in-progress as opposed to a polished item ready for prime-time usage. Their top priorities seemed concentrated on packing in every feature under the sun, with poor usability as a second thought.
And talking features, I quickly recognized the low price tag included costly concessions …
Deceptive Pricing GoHighLevel LevelUp Summit
Among GoHighLevel’s biggest marketing factors is the budget friendly rate for accessibility to so many features. Yet I quickly learned this cheap base cost was deceptive.
They nickle-and-dimed individuals with sporadic charges for core performance. Instantly my credit card statements had vague $10 costs from GoHighLevel here and there.
As it ended up, you obtain billed whenever you send an e-mail through their servers. So for high quantity users, this amounted to numerous dollars in unforeseen expenses.
Between these per-email fees and paying extra for deliverability add-ons like Mailgun, my “cost effective” GoHighLevel subscription wound up costing substantially greater than my Keap plan.
The low sticker price was tempting, yet simply not sensible in practice. This bait-and-switch left a bad preference in my mouth.
Email Rates Suffered
The final dealbreaker was seeing my meticulously nurtured email open rates plunge nearly over night after switching to GoHighLevel.
Previously, my target market involvement constantly struck 35-40% open rates in Keap month after month. Once I moved their documents over to GoHighLevel, performance tanked quickly to a pathetic 9% open price.
Despite how much I enhanced my sending out practices or attempted every fixing technique, I might barely nudge open prices back into the teenagers– still a 50%+ decrease from my previous standards GoHighLevel LevelUp Summit.
Let me repeat: my exact same audience and emails suddenly had terrible involvement. The only thing I can think that would be causing this was whatever was taking place behind the scenes at GoHighLevel. For a firm so based on e-mail marketing, this was a big deal.
In between the crippling deliverability concerns, hidden costs, broken features, and awful interface, I had finally reached my limitation …
Why I Quit GoHighLevel after 37 Days
Just 45 days after moving my company to GoHighLevel, I knew I had actually made a huge blunder. The cons drastically surpassed any advantages.
No software is excellent, however the large volume of problems was past acceptable.
At the end of the day, software application boils down to trust. If I can’t trust it to handle essential functions competently or think a supplier has my best interests in mind, after that it’s time to walk away– also after investing considerable time, money, and effort migrating.
So I made the difficult phone call to turn around course and return back to Keap totally just weeks after going done in on GoHighLevel. Allow’s explore what I gained from this ordeal.
Secret Takeaways: What I Gained from My GoHighLevel Mistake
My time with HighLevel can be summed up as an expensive ill fortune. But in knowledge, it taught me a few essential lessons:
- Stay with what jobs. Don’t distress what’s functioning unless something is definitively better across the board. Modification brings threat.
- Veterinarian claims extensively. Marketing buzz around brand-new software typically covers bigger underlying problems. Deep due diligence is crucial.
- Select simplicity over features. Well-designed tools should make your work life less complicated, not much more difficult and untidy.
- Transparency builds depend on. Opaque pricing, shady reseller terms, and finger-pointing to evade issues damages trust fund.
- Seek honest testimonials. Pleased support reviews indicate much less if excessive concerns imply poor general functionality.
- Excellence is difficult. No solitary service can completely meet every one-of-a-kind service need. Locate the least-bad fit.
- Advancement over revolution. Incremental enhancements generally exceed high-risk wholesale reinvention of what already functions penalty.
Simply put, I found out to be a lot more hesitant of “too good to be true” marketing claims and much less lured by the allure of glossy new items. The devices you use daily should gain trust via transparency and performance, not glossy advertising.