As an agency owner for over a decade, I count on software application and automation to improve operations and supply results. So when GoHighLevel emerged on the scene couple of years back, it definitely caught my attention GoHighLevel Call Recording.
The idea was appealing– an all-in-one client administration system with marketing, sales, and solution devices integrated with each other. As a business owner always wanting to simplify and scale my company, it looked like a desire become a reality on paper. Who wouldn’t want a solitary solution that does it all?
Yet in this thorough GoHighLevel evaluation, I’ll take you inside my dreadful journey of attempting (and falling short) to switch to this preferred new software program. You’ll learn:
If you’re taking into consideration whether GoHighLevel is right for your own company requirements, ideally you can gain from my excruciating mistakes and inflated expectations.
Spoiler: I do NOT recommend GoHighLevel. If you require a CRM, start with this listing of best CRMs instead. I make use of Keap.
Some GoHighLevel Alternatives
If you’re looking for a sales, marketing, and job management alternative to GoHighLevel, then here are a couple of we suggest.
Backstory: Why I Considered Changing from Keap
To comprehend what attracted me to GoHighLevel to begin with, you require context about my previous setup. For over 5 years I had been gladly depending on Keap (formerly Infusionsoft) to satisfy all my client administration and automation requirements.
I discovered Keap instinctive to utilize and it took care of whatever I needed– CRM, email marketing, sales funnels, membership sites, and customer support.
Keap’s CRM and sales and marketing automation are designed to assist local business maintain their clients while including brand-new ones easily. Automate follow-ups with e-mails and texts, making certain leads and customers receive the right messages at the correct time. Usage website and social networks types to simplify lead follow-up, and handle your growth with very easy visit organizing and lead tracking. Boost sales with automated quoting, invoicing, and repayment processing, liberating your time. With Keap, small businesses can conserve 10 hours per week and increase profits by 39%. Begin with a 14-day free trial, no credit card required.
Why we like Keap
Keap uses a detailed client partnership monitoring (CRM) and marketing automation option tailored for local business and business owners. We value Keap’s focus on streamlining sales processes and supporting client partnerships via effective automation devices. The system’s all-in-one approach integrates CRM, e-mail marketing, invoicing, and task management, making it specifically eye-catching for services aiming to combine their tech pile.
Essentially, it just worked dependably with very little difficulty or upkeep called for. My open and click-through prices were fantastic (like 35% fantastic). Automations ran smoothly without any concerns.
So why in the world was I tempted to uproot my whole operational foundation from a system that worked to try something unverified and untried?
In knowledge I can admit I got seduced by the alarm call of “glossy things disorder”. You understand the sensation: when everybody’s discussing a new tool that will certainly reinvent your business … The turf commonly looks greener on the other side, and I asked yourself whether GoHighLevel might minimize friction factors that I would certainly found out to tolerate throughout the years with Keap.
I stood up to initially, however a couple of more disappointments led me to think maybe it was time for an adjustment.
The Financial investment: Moving My Agency to GoHighLevel
Earlier this year I made a decision to start. I signed up for HighLevel’s Firm plan at $297/month, investing significantly more than the $97/month starter expense.
This had not been a decision I ignored. I knew switching over platforms was going to need moving all my Keap information and basically reconstructing my entire tech framework from the ground up utilizing all of the GoHighLevel integrations offered.
Right here’s a summary of simply a few of the effort required:
- Manually exporting 20,000+ e-mail subscriber records
- Recreating dozens of automations and workflows
- Relocating customer profiles, notes, and task information to the brand-new CRM
- Reconfiguring my Stripe payment integration
- Setting up landing pages, discounts, and sales funnels around once again
- Learning a totally international UX and interface design
All in, I invested around 30-40 tiresome hours of configuration work transitioning everything over– and also managing lost efficiency throughout the button.
Yet ultimately, it was a calculated financial investment I wanted to make. I figured some short-term pain would certainly repay with GoHighLevel supplying a much better lasting remedy for my business, Dripify. Oh how incorrect I was …
It only took me about a month of hands-on usage to recognize I had actually made a huge mistake. The concerns started piling up promptly, up until it reached a point I needed to reduce my losses and change back to Keap totally.
Allow’s go through the horrible issues I came across.
Safety And Security Issues & Lots of Bugs
Provided GoHighLevel placed itself as an all-in-one automation platform, I made sure to thoroughly recreate each and every single workflow from my old Keap account.
These included sequences for onboarding brand-new email customers, onboarding new customers, automating follow-ups for webinar enrollments, sending occasion tips, managing subscription expiries and a lot more.
Everything appeared to be operating fine … till all of a sudden it had not been. One early morning, I awoke to find 171 entirely unnecessary emails had been sent out to customers who should NOT have obtained them. This occurred 3 days straight, with a various set of 160 people daily.
I anxiously attempted troubleshooting and rebuilding the automation from the ground up. But the problem continued.
When I frantically connected to their support team, they vaguely claimed “server concerns” were responsible. However this description really did not make any type of sense, since the mistakes proceeded taking place each early morning like clockwork unrelated to any type of downtime.
In my mind, this substantial failing was entirely undesirable and just really did not benefit my service. I have hundreds of calls relying on my automated campaigns running efficiently.
So if GoHighLevel was going to be absolutely unreliable, just how could I leave mission-critical workflows and delicate client information to their technology?
The unintuitive user interface only intensified these issues …
Frustrating UX
Coming from Keap where every little thing was smooth and intuitive, GoHighLevel’s learning curve really felt steep and difficult.
Basic jobs like editing and enhancing workflows entailed excavating via food selection systems that were all over the place. Key setups were unexplainably spread in entirely various sections. Relocating in between functions felt disjointed or confusing.
I’ll inform you what I indicate by speaking about their funnel builder as an instance. There were 3 different settings panels to take care of general, private, and product arrangements. Yet for some insane reason, the links to accessibility each of these core settings were expanded on contrary sides of the screen. What!?
As someone that values tidy, thoughtful style, this seriously irritated me.
It enhanced that GoHighLevel still seemed like a work-in-progress as opposed to a sleek product ready for prime-time use. Their priorities seemed focused on stuffing in every feature imaginable, with poor functionality as an afterthought.
And speaking of features, I soon understood the low cost tag included expensive compromises …
Misleading Pricing GoHighLevel Call Recording
One of GoHighLevel’s greatest selling factors is the budget friendly rate for access to so many features. But I swiftly learned this affordable base expense was misleading.
They nickle-and-dimed individuals with sporadic costs for core functionality. All of a sudden my charge card declarations had unclear $10 fees from GoHighLevel here and there.
As it turned out, you obtain billed every single time you send an email via their servers. So for high volume users, this added up to thousands of dollars in unexpected prices.
Between these per-email costs and paying added for deliverability attachments like Mailgun, my “economical” GoHighLevel subscription wound up setting you back significantly greater than my Keap plan.
The reduced price tag was appealing, yet simply not realistic in practice. This bait-and-switch left a poor preference in my mouth.
Email Rates Suffered
The final dealbreaker was seeing my meticulously supported email open prices plummet virtually over night after switching over to GoHighLevel.
Previously, my audience interaction regularly struck 35-40% open rates in Keap month after month. Once I moved their documents over to GoHighLevel, performance tanked promptly to a pathetic 9% open price.
Despite how much I optimized my sending out practices or tried every fixing technique, I can barely nudge open prices back right into the teenagers– still a 50%+ decrease from my previous standards GoHighLevel Call Recording.
Let me repeat: my exact same audience and emails instantly had terrible engagement. The only thing I might assume that would certainly be creating this was whatever was happening behind the scenes at GoHighLevel. For a firm so based on e-mail marketing, this was a big deal.
In between the crippling deliverability problems, hidden fees, busted features, and awful user interface, I had actually finally reached my restriction …
Why I Stop GoHighLevel after 37 Days
Just 45 days after migrating my agency to GoHighLevel, I knew I had actually made a huge mistake. The cons dramatically outweighed any kind of benefits.
No software is ideal, yet the sheer quantity of troubles was past acceptable.
At the end of the day, software program boils down to count on. If I can not trust it to handle crucial functions capably or believe a vendor has my benefits in mind, then it’s time to leave– even after spending substantial time, money, and effort migrating.
So I made the tough contact us to reverse program and return back to Keap totally just weeks after going all in on GoHighLevel. Allow’s discover what I gained from this fiasco.
Secret Takeaways: What I Picked up from My GoHighLevel Mistake
My time with HighLevel can be summarized as a costly misadventure. However in knowledge, it taught me a few key lessons:
- Stay with what works. Don’t distress what’s working unless something is definitively better across the board. Change brings risk.
- Vet asserts extensively. Marketing hype around new software program usually obscures larger underlying imperfections. Deep due diligence is essential.
- Select simpleness over features. Properly designed tools need to make your work life less complicated, not a lot more challenging and unpleasant.
- Openness constructs trust fund. Opaque pricing, unethical reseller terms, and finger-pointing to escape problems ruins count on.
- Look for objective evaluations. Pleased support reviews suggest much less if extreme concerns indicate inadequate overall functionality.
- Excellence is difficult. No single remedy can completely fulfill every distinct business need. Discover the least-bad fit.
- Evolution over revolution. Step-by-step enhancements commonly outweigh risky wholesale reinvention of what already works fine.
In short, I found out to be extra cynical of “also good to be true” marketing insurance claims and less lured by the allure of shiny new items. The tools you make use of daily must earn trust fund with transparency and efficiency, not slick advertising.