As an agency owner for over a decade, I depend on software and automation to simplify procedures and provide results. So when GoHighLevel arised on the scene few years back, it most definitely caught my interest Become a HighLeveler.
The concept was attractive– an all-in-one client monitoring system with marketing, sales, and solution tools incorporated together. As a business owner always aiming to simplify and scale my organization, it felt like a dream become a reality on paper. Who would not want a single solution that does it all?
Yet in this extensive GoHighLevel testimonial, I’ll take you inside my devastating journey of trying (and failing) to switch to this preferred brand-new software application. You’ll discover:
If you’re thinking about whether GoHighLevel is right for your very own business demands, ideally you can pick up from my excruciating blunders and blew up expectations.
Looter: I do NOT suggest GoHighLevel. If you require a CRM, start with this listing of finest CRMs rather. I utilize Keap.
Some GoHighLevel Alternatives
If you’re searching for a sales, marketing, and job management option to GoHighLevel, after that here are a couple of we advise.
Backstory: Why I Took Into Consideration Changing from Keap
To recognize what attracted me to GoHighLevel in the first place, you need context regarding my previous configuration. For over 5 years I had been happily depending on Keap (previously Infusionsoft) to satisfy all my customer administration and automation needs.
I located Keap user-friendly to utilize and it handled everything I needed– CRM, email marketing, sales funnels, membership sites, and customer support.
Keap’s CRM and sales and marketing automation are made to aid small companies keep their clients while including brand-new ones effortlessly. Automate follow-ups with emails and messages, guaranteeing leads and clients obtain the right messages at the right time. Usage web site and social media sites types to improve lead follow-up, and handle your growth with very easy consultation organizing and lead monitoring. Boost sales with automated pricing estimate, invoicing, and settlement handling, liberating your time. With Keap, small businesses can conserve 10 hours each week and rise earnings by 39%. Begin with a 14-day free trial, no charge card needed.
Why we like Keap
Keap provides a thorough client connection monitoring (CRM) and marketing automation remedy customized for small companies and business owners. We appreciate Keap’s concentrate on improving sales procedures and supporting customer relationships via effective automation devices. The platform’s all-in-one approach incorporates CRM, email marketing, invoicing, and task management, making it especially appealing for companies seeking to consolidate their tech pile.
Essentially, it just functioned reliably with very little difficulty or upkeep needed. My open and click-through rates were fantastic (like 35% wonderful). Automations ran efficiently with no issues.
So why on earth was I tempted to uproot my entire operational foundation from a system that functioned to attempt something unproven and untried?
In hindsight I can confess I obtained attracted by the alarm telephone call of “glossy things syndrome”. You know the sensation: when everybody’s speaking about a new tool that will revolutionize your service … The turf usually looks greener on the other side, and I wondered whether GoHighLevel could minimize rubbing factors that I would certainly discovered to tolerate throughout the years with Keap.
I withstood in the beginning, but a few even more stress led me to assume maybe it was time for an adjustment.
The Financial investment: Migrating My Company to GoHighLevel
Earlier this year I decided to take the plunge. I enrolled in HighLevel’s Firm plan at $297/month, spending significantly more than the $97/month starter expense.
This wasn’t a choice I took lightly. I knew switching over platforms was mosting likely to require moving all my Keap data and basically reconstructing my whole technology framework from scratch utilizing all of the GoHighLevel integrations readily available.
Below’s a review of just some of the initiative needed:
- Manually exporting 20,000+ e-mail client documents
- Recreating loads of automations and workflows
- Relocating customer accounts, notes, and project information to the new CRM
- Reconfiguring my Stripe billing integration
- Setting up landing pages, coupons, and sales funnels throughout again
- Learning a completely foreign UX and interface layout
All in, I spent around 30-40 tedious hours of setup job transitioning everything over– in addition to handling lost productivity during the switch.
Yet inevitably, it was a computed investment I was willing to make. I figured some temporary discomfort would certainly pay off with GoHighLevel providing a much better long-term option for my business, Dripify. Oh just how incorrect I was …
It only took me regarding a month of hands-on use to recognize I had actually made a large blunder. The concerns started accumulating rapidly, until it got to a factor I had to reduce my losses and switch over back to Keap completely.
Let’s walk through the nightmarish issues I ran into.
Safety And Security Issues & Several Vermin
Given GoHighLevel positioned itself as an all-in-one automation platform, I took care to carefully recreate every workflow from my old Keap account.
These included sequences for onboarding brand-new email customers, onboarding new clients, automating follow-ups for webinar enrollments, sending event pointers, taking care of subscription expiries and a lot more.
Everything appeared to be functioning fine … till instantly it wasn’t. One early morning, I woke up to find 171 completely unimportant e-mails had been sent out to individuals that should NOT have obtained them. This occurred three days straight, with a various batch of 160 people every day.
I desperately tried repairing and rebuilding the automation from scratch. However the trouble continued.
When I seriously reached out to their assistance group, they vaguely asserted “web server issues” were responsible. However this description really did not make any type of feeling, considering that the errors continued happening each morning like clockwork unrelated to any downtime.
In my mind, this large failure was completely unacceptable and just didn’t work for my organization. I have hundreds of get in touches with relying on my automated campaigns running efficiently.
So if GoHighLevel was mosting likely to be absolutely undependable, exactly how could I hand over mission-critical workflows and sensitive customer information to their technology?
The unintuitive interface just worsened these problems …
Discouraging UX
Coming from Keap where every little thing was smooth and intuitive, GoHighLevel’s learning contour really felt high and challenging.
Basic jobs like editing workflows involved excavating via menu systems that were all over the place. Secret settings were unexplainably spread in absolutely different sections. Moving between features felt disjointed or complex.
I’ll inform you what I mean by discussing their funnel builder as an instance. There were 3 different settings panels to manage general, private, and product arrangements. Yet for some crazy reason, the web links to gain access to each of these core settings were expanded on opposite sides of the screen. What!?
As a person who values tidy, thoughtful layout, this seriously upset me.
It enhanced that GoHighLevel still felt like a work-in-progress as opposed to a polished product ready for prime-time usage. Their top priorities seemed focused on cramming in every feature imaginable, with bad functionality as a second thought.
And talking features, I quickly recognized the low price tag included costly compromises …
Misleading Pricing Become a HighLeveler
One of GoHighLevel’s biggest selling factors is the budget-friendly price for accessibility to many features. Yet I promptly learned this economical base price was deceitful.
They nickle-and-dimed users with sporadic charges for core functionality. Unexpectedly my bank card declarations had unclear $10 costs from GoHighLevel occasionally.
As it ended up, you get billed each time you send out an e-mail via their servers. So for high quantity individuals, this added up to numerous bucks in unexpected prices.
In between these per-email charges and paying added for deliverability attachments like Mailgun, my “inexpensive” GoHighLevel subscription ended up costing considerably greater than my Keap plan.
The low price tag was tempting, yet simply not sensible in practice. This bait-and-switch left a negative taste in my mouth.
Email Rates Suffered
The final dealbreaker was seeing my meticulously nurtured email open rates drop practically overnight after changing to GoHighLevel.
Previously, my audience interaction regularly struck 35-40% open prices in Keap month after month. But once I moved their documents over to GoHighLevel, performance tanked immediately to a worthless 9% open rate.
Despite how much I enhanced my sending out techniques or tried every fixing method, I could barely nudge open rates back into the teenagers– still a 50%+ decrease from my previous standards Become a HighLeveler.
Let me repeat: my exact same target market and emails all of a sudden had awful involvement. The only point I might believe that would certainly be triggering this was whatever was happening behind the scenes at GoHighLevel. For a company so dependent on email marketing, this was a big deal.
Between the crippling deliverability issues, hidden charges, broken features, and awful interface, I had actually lastly reached my restriction …
Why I Stop GoHighLevel after 37 Days
Simply 45 days after migrating my company to GoHighLevel, I understood I had made a massive blunder. The cons substantially exceeded any type of advantages.
No software program is excellent, yet the large quantity of troubles was past acceptable.
At the end of the day, software application boils down to depend on. If I can not trust it to handle critical features properly or think a supplier has my benefits in mind, then it’s time to walk away– also after investing considerable time, money, and initiative moving.
So I made the difficult call to reverse course and return back to Keap completely just weeks after going all in on GoHighLevel. Allow’s discover what I learned from this ordeal.
Key Takeaways: What I Gained from My GoHighLevel Error
My time with HighLevel can be summarized as a costly misadventure. But in hindsight, it educated me a few essential lessons:
- Stay with what works. Do not distress what’s working unless something is definitively better across the board. Adjustment brings risk.
- Vet asserts thoroughly. Marketing buzz around brand-new software program commonly covers bigger underlying problems. Deep due persistance is important.
- Select simpleness over features. Properly designed devices need to make your work life simpler, not a lot more difficult and unpleasant.
- Transparency constructs trust fund. Nontransparent pricing, unethical reseller terms, and finger-pointing to avert troubles destroys depend on.
- Seek impartial testimonials. Delighted assistance reviews mean much less if excessive concerns suggest inadequate total usability.
- Excellence is impossible. No single solution can perfectly fulfill every special company requirement. Discover the least-bad fit.
- Evolution over revolution. Incremental renovations usually outweigh dangerous wholesale reinvention of what currently functions penalty.
Basically, I learned to be much more doubtful of “too excellent to be true” marketing claims and much less attracted by the appeal of glossy brand-new objects. The devices you utilize daily ought to gain trust via transparency and efficiency, not glossy advertising.