As a firm owner for over a years, I rely upon software application and automation to simplify operations and provide results. So when GoHighLevel emerged on the scene few years back, it most definitely caught my attention Does GoHighLevel Have A Dialer.
The concept was attractive– an all-in-one client monitoring platform with marketing, sales, and solution devices integrated with each other. As a business owner constantly looking to streamline and scale my service, it looked like a dream come true on paper. Who would not want a solitary option that does it all?
But in this in-depth GoHighLevel testimonial, I’ll take you inside my tragic trip of attempting (and failing) to switch over to this prominent new software application. You’ll discover:
If you’re thinking about whether GoHighLevel is right for your own organization demands, hopefully you can pick up from my painful blunders and blew up assumptions.
Spoiler: I do NOT advise GoHighLevel. If you require a CRM, start with this checklist of finest CRMs rather. I make use of Keap.
Some GoHighLevel Alternatives
If you’re searching for a sales, marketing, and project administration alternative to GoHighLevel, after that below are a couple of we suggest.
Backstory: Why I Thought About Switching Over from Keap
To understand what attracted me to GoHighLevel in the first place, you need context about my previous arrangement. For over 5 years I had actually been happily depending on Keap (previously Infusionsoft) to satisfy all my client monitoring and automation requirements.
I found Keap intuitive to utilize and it dealt with every little thing I needed– CRM, email marketing, sales funnels, membership websites, and customer support.
Keap’s CRM and sales and marketing automation are developed to help local business maintain their customers while including new ones effortlessly. Automate follow-ups with emails and messages, making certain leads and customers receive the appropriate messages at the correct time. Use internet site and social media forms to streamline lead follow-up, and handle your development with easy appointment scheduling and lead monitoring. Boost sales with automated pricing quote, invoicing, and settlement processing, liberating your time. With Keap, small companies can conserve 10 hours each week and increase profits by 39%. Begin with a 14-day free trial, no bank card called for.
Why we like Keap
Keap supplies a detailed client partnership monitoring (CRM) and marketing automation solution customized for small businesses and entrepreneurs. We appreciate Keap’s concentrate on enhancing sales processes and supporting consumer partnerships through powerful automation tools. The platform’s all-in-one technique combines CRM, e-mail marketing, invoicing, and task management, making it specifically eye-catching for businesses seeking to consolidate their tech pile.
Generally, it just functioned dependably with marginal fuss or maintenance required. My open and click-through rates were great (like 35% excellent). Automations ran efficiently without any problems.
So why in the world was I lured to uproot my entire functional foundation from a system that worked to try something unproven and untested?
In hindsight I can confess I got seduced by the siren phone call of “shiny object syndrome”. You know the sensation: when every person’s discussing a brand-new tool that will certainly change your business … The turf usually looks greener on the other side, and I questioned whether GoHighLevel may lower friction factors that I would certainly discovered to endure for many years with Keap.
I resisted at first, however a couple of even more stress led me to believe perhaps it was time for a modification.
The Financial investment: Moving My Agency to GoHighLevel
Previously this year I chose to take the plunge. I registered for HighLevel’s Firm plan at $297/month, spending dramatically more than the $97/month starter expense.
This wasn’t a decision I took lightly. I understood changing systems was mosting likely to need migrating all my Keap information and basically restoring my whole tech infrastructure from scratch making use of all of the GoHighLevel integrations readily available.
Below’s a summary of just several of the initiative required:
- By hand exporting 20,000+ email subscriber records
- Recreating dozens of automations and workflows
- Relocating client profiles, notes, and task data to the brand-new CRM
- Reconfiguring my Stripe billing integration
- Establishing landing pages, promotions, and sales funnels around once again
- Learning a totally foreign UX and user interface style
Done in, I spent around 30-40 tiresome hours of arrangement work transitioning every little thing over– as well as handling shed productivity throughout the switch.
Yet eventually, it was a computed investment I was willing to make. I figured some short-term pain would certainly settle with GoHighLevel giving a far better lasting solution for my service, Dripify. Oh how wrong I was …
It just took me concerning a month of hands-on use to realize I had actually made a big mistake. The issues began piling up swiftly, up until it got to a factor I needed to cut my losses and switch over back to Keap completely.
Allow’s walk through the nightmarish troubles I came across.
Safety And Security Issues & Lots of Vermin
Provided GoHighLevel placed itself as an all-in-one automation platform, I took care to diligently recreate every single workflow from my old Keap account.
These consisted of sequences for onboarding brand-new email customers, onboarding brand-new clients, automating follow-ups for webinar enrollments, sending out occasion pointers, handling subscription expiries and much more.
Whatever appeared to be operating penalty … up until all of a sudden it wasn’t. One morning, I awoke to find 171 totally unimportant e-mails had been sent to individuals that need to NOT have obtained them. This took place three days straight, with a various set of 160 individuals each day.
I desperately tried troubleshooting and reconstructing the automation from the ground up. However the trouble persisted.
When I seriously connected to their support group, they slightly claimed “web server concerns” were to blame. But this description really did not make any sense, considering that the errors continued taking place each morning like clockwork unrelated to any kind of downtime.
In my mind, this massive failure was entirely unacceptable and simply really did not benefit my company. I have thousands of contacts relying upon my automated campaigns running efficiently.
So if GoHighLevel was going to be absolutely undependable, how could I delegate mission-critical workflows and delicate customer information to their modern technology?
The unintuitive user interface only compounded these issues …
Frustrating UX
Originating from Keap where everything was seamless and user-friendly, GoHighLevel’s learning contour really felt high and difficult.
Easy jobs like editing and enhancing workflows involved digging via menu systems that were all over the place. Trick setups were unexplainably spread in totally different areas. Moving in between functions really felt disjointed or complicated.
I’ll inform you what I imply by speaking about their funnel builder as an instance. There were 3 separate setups panels to manage total, individual, and product configurations. Yet for some crazy reason, the links to accessibility each of these core setups were spread out on contrary sides of the screen. What!?
As someone that values clean, thoughtful layout, this seriously upset me.
It reinforced that GoHighLevel still felt like a work-in-progress rather than a sleek product ready for prime-time usage. Their concerns seemed focused on cramming in every feature imaginable, with inadequate functionality as a second thought.
And speaking of features, I soon understood the low price tag included costly concessions …
Deceptive Pricing Does GoHighLevel Have A Dialer
Among GoHighLevel’s greatest marketing factors is the inexpensive price for accessibility to a lot of features. But I swiftly discovered this inexpensive base expense was misleading.
They nickle-and-dimed users with erratic fees for core performance. Unexpectedly my credit card statements had unclear $10 costs from GoHighLevel here and there.
As it turned out, you get charged whenever you send an e-mail with their web servers. So for high quantity users, this added up to thousands of bucks in unanticipated expenses.
In between these per-email costs and paying added for deliverability attachments like Mailgun, my “economical” GoHighLevel subscription ended up setting you back substantially MORE than my Keap plan.
The reduced price tag was appealing, yet just not sensible in practice. This bait-and-switch left a negative preference in my mouth.
Email Fees Suffered
The last dealbreaker was seeing my meticulously nurtured email open rates drop practically overnight after changing to GoHighLevel.
Formerly, my target market involvement constantly hit 35-40% open rates in Keap month after month. But once I moved their records over to GoHighLevel, performance tanked immediately to a pathetic 9% open rate.
Despite how much I maximized my sending out practices or tried every fixing method, I can barely push open rates back right into the teenagers– still a 50%+ decline from my previous criteria Does GoHighLevel Have A Dialer.
Let me repeat: my exact same audience and emails instantly had terrible interaction. The only point I could think that would be creating this was whatever was occurring behind the scenes at GoHighLevel. For a company so depending on email marketing, this was a big deal.
Between the debilitating deliverability concerns, concealed fees, busted features, and dreadful user interface, I had actually finally reached my restriction …
Why I Stop GoHighLevel after 37 Days
Just 45 days after migrating my firm to GoHighLevel, I understood I had actually made a significant mistake. The disadvantages substantially outweighed any advantages.
No software is excellent, yet the sheer volume of issues was past acceptable.
At the end of the day, software comes down to trust. If I can’t trust it to manage essential features capably or think a supplier has my benefits in mind, after that it’s time to leave– also after investing significant time, cash, and initiative migrating.
So I made the difficult contact us to turn around training course and return back to Keap completely simply weeks after going done in on GoHighLevel. Allow’s discover what I gained from this fiasco.
Key Takeaways: What I Gained from My GoHighLevel Mistake
My time with HighLevel can be summarized as a costly ill fortune. However in hindsight, it educated me a couple of crucial lessons:
- Stay with what works. Do not disturb what’s working unless something is definitively much better across the board. Modification brings risk.
- Vet asserts thoroughly. Marketing hype around new software frequently obscures bigger underlying imperfections. Deep due diligence is important.
- Select simplicity over features. Properly designed devices ought to make your work life simpler, not much more complex and unpleasant.
- Transparency constructs trust. Nontransparent pricing, shady reseller terms, and finger-pointing to escape problems ruins depend on.
- Seek objective reviews. Delighted assistance evaluates imply less if too much concerns indicate bad general functionality.
- Excellence is impossible. No solitary option can perfectly satisfy every special organization requirement. Discover the least-bad fit.
- Evolution over change. Incremental improvements generally surpass high-risk wholesale reinvention of what currently functions fine.
Simply put, I found out to be extra skeptical of “too good to be real” marketing claims and much less attracted by the allure of glossy brand-new objects. The tools you utilize daily should earn trust via transparency and performance, not glossy advertising.