As a company owner for over a years, I depend on software and automation to simplify operations and provide results. So when GoHighLevel emerged on the scene few years back, it certainly caught my focus GoHighLevel Coaching Snapshot.
The concept was attractive– an all-in-one client management system with marketing, sales, and solution tools incorporated together. As a business owner always wanting to simplify and scale my organization, it looked like a desire become a reality on paper. Who wouldn’t desire a single solution that does it all?
However in this comprehensive GoHighLevel evaluation, I’ll take you inside my devastating journey of trying (and failing) to change to this preferred brand-new software application. You’ll discover:
If you’re considering whether GoHighLevel is right for your very own company needs, ideally you can gain from my agonizing errors and pumped up assumptions.
Looter: I do NOT suggest GoHighLevel. If you require a CRM, begin with this checklist of best CRMs rather. I utilize Keap.
Some GoHighLevel Alternatives
If you’re seeking a sales, marketing, and job management alternative to GoHighLevel, then right here are a couple of we recommend.
Backstory: Why I Considered Changing from Keap
To understand what attracted me to GoHighLevel in the first place, you need context concerning my previous configuration. For over 5 years I had actually been happily relying upon Keap (previously Infusionsoft) to fulfill all my customer monitoring and automation demands.
I discovered Keap instinctive to make use of and it took care of whatever I required– CRM, email marketing, sales funnels, subscription sites, and customer assistance.
Keap’s CRM and sales and marketing automation are developed to help small businesses keep their clients while adding brand-new ones easily. Automate follow-ups with e-mails and messages, ensuring leads and clients receive the right messages at the right time. Use web site and social media sites forms to streamline lead follow-up, and manage your development with easy consultation organizing and lead monitoring. Boost sales with automated estimating, invoicing, and payment handling, maximizing your time. With Keap, local business can conserve 10 hours per week and rise earnings by 39%. Start with a 14-day free trial, no charge card called for.
Why we like Keap
Keap uses a comprehensive client connection monitoring (CRM) and marketing automation service customized for small companies and business owners. We value Keap’s focus on simplifying sales procedures and nurturing client connections through powerful automation tools. The system’s all-in-one technique integrates CRM, e-mail marketing, invoicing, and job monitoring, making it particularly attractive for businesses aiming to consolidate their tech pile.
Essentially, it just functioned accurately with minimal difficulty or maintenance required. My open and click-through rates were terrific (like 35% fantastic). Automations ran smoothly without issues.
So why on earth was I lured to uproot my entire functional structure from a system that functioned to try something unverified and untried?
In knowledge I can admit I obtained attracted by the alarm call of “glossy things disorder”. You recognize the sensation: when every person’s discussing a new tool that will change your organization … The grass typically looks greener beyond, and I wondered whether GoHighLevel could lower rubbing points that I would certainly learned to tolerate over the years with Keap.
I stood up to at first, but a few even more irritations led me to assume perhaps it was time for a change.
The Investment: Moving My Agency to GoHighLevel
Earlier this year I decided to start. I signed up for HighLevel’s Agency plan at $297/month, investing considerably greater than the $97/month starter cost.
This had not been a choice I ignored. I understood changing platforms was going to call for moving all my Keap data and basically restoring my entire tech framework from square one utilizing all of the GoHighLevel integrations available.
Below’s an introduction of just several of the effort required:
- Manually exporting 20,000+ email customer documents
- Recreating loads of automations and workflows
- Relocating client accounts, notes, and project information to the brand-new CRM
- Reconfiguring my Stripe invoicing integration
- Establishing landing pages, promotions, and sales funnels throughout once again
- Learning a totally international UX and interface layout
All in, I invested around 30-40 laborious hours of arrangement job transitioning everything over– and also taking care of shed performance throughout the switch.
However inevitably, it was a computed investment I agreed to make. I figured some temporary discomfort would pay off with GoHighLevel supplying a better long-lasting solution for my organization, Dripify. Oh how wrong I was …
It only took me about a month of hands-on use to recognize I had actually made a huge error. The problems started piling up quickly, till it reached a point I needed to reduce my losses and switch back to Keap totally.
Let’s walk through the nightmarish issues I ran into.
Protection Issues & Several Vermin
Provided GoHighLevel placed itself as an all-in-one automation system, I took care to meticulously recreate each and every single workflow from my old Keap account.
These consisted of sequences for onboarding brand-new e-mail customers, onboarding brand-new clients, automating follow-ups for webinar enrollments, sending occasion suggestions, taking care of subscription expiries and far more.
Every little thing seemed to be functioning fine … up until suddenly it wasn’t. One early morning, I awoke to find 171 entirely unnecessary emails had been sent out to individuals that must NOT have actually received them. This happened 3 days straight, with a various batch of 160 individuals each day.
I hysterically tried fixing and rebuilding the automation from the ground up. Yet the trouble continued.
When I desperately connected to their assistance group, they slightly asserted “server issues” were to blame. But this description didn’t make any kind of sense, given that the mistakes continued occurring each morning like clockwork unrelated to any type of downtime.
In my mind, this enormous failure was entirely unacceptable and simply didn’t benefit my service. I have countless contacts depending on my automated campaigns running efficiently.
So if GoHighLevel was mosting likely to be totally undependable, how could I delegate mission-critical workflows and delicate customer information to their modern technology?
The unintuitive user interface only compounded these problems …
Irritating UX
Coming from Keap where everything was smooth and user-friendly, GoHighLevel’s learning curve felt steep and complicated.
Straightforward tasks like editing workflows included excavating via menu systems that were all over the place. Secret settings were unexplainably spread in entirely various sections. Moving in between features really felt disjointed or complex.
I’ll tell you what I indicate by talking about their funnel builder as an example. There were 3 separate settings panels to manage general, individual, and item arrangements. Yet for some crazy factor, the web links to gain access to each of these core settings were expanded on opposite sides of the display. What!?
As a person who values tidy, thoughtful style, this seriously irritated me.
It enhanced that GoHighLevel still felt like a work-in-progress instead of a refined item ready for prime-time usage. Their priorities seemed focused on stuffing in every feature under the sun, with poor usability as a second thought.
And speaking of features, I quickly realized the low price tag came with expensive concessions …
Misleading Pricing GoHighLevel Coaching Snapshot
One of GoHighLevel’s biggest marketing points is the economical rate for accessibility to many features. Yet I swiftly learned this economical base cost was deceptive.
They nickle-and-dimed individuals with occasional costs for core capability. Unexpectedly my charge card declarations had vague $10 charges from GoHighLevel occasionally.
As it turned out, you get billed each time you send an e-mail through their web servers. So for high volume customers, this amounted to hundreds of dollars in unexpected costs.
In between these per-email fees and paying added for deliverability add-ons like Mailgun, my “budget friendly” GoHighLevel subscription wound up setting you back substantially MORE than my Keap plan.
The reduced sticker price was tempting, but just not sensible in practice. This bait-and-switch left a bad taste in my mouth.
Email Fees Suffered
The final dealbreaker was seeing my thoroughly supported email open rates plummet almost overnight after changing to GoHighLevel.
Formerly, my target market interaction consistently hit 35-40% open rates in Keap month after month. But once I migrated their records over to GoHighLevel, efficiency tanked quickly to a pathetic 9% open rate.
No matter how much I enhanced my sending out methods or tried every fixing trick, I could hardly push open rates back into the teenagers– still a 50%+ decline from my previous benchmarks GoHighLevel Coaching Snapshot.
Let me repeat: my exact same target market and e-mails all of a sudden had horrible involvement. The only thing I might assume that would be causing this was whatever was occurring behind the scenes at GoHighLevel. For an agency so based on e-mail marketing, this was a big deal.
Between the debilitating deliverability concerns, concealed charges, busted features, and horrible user interface, I had actually finally reached my restriction …
Why I Quit GoHighLevel after 37 Days
Simply 45 days after moving my agency to GoHighLevel, I knew I had made a significant blunder. The cons significantly exceeded any advantages.
No software program is best, but the sheer quantity of troubles was beyond appropriate.
At the end of the day, software boils down to trust. If I can not trust it to handle essential functions properly or believe a vendor has my benefits in mind, after that it’s time to leave– also after spending substantial time, money, and initiative migrating.
So I made the hard call to turn around training course and return back to Keap totally simply weeks after going all in on GoHighLevel. Let’s explore what I picked up from this debacle.
Secret Takeaways: What I Learned From My GoHighLevel Blunder
My time with HighLevel can be summarized as a pricey misadventure. But in knowledge, it instructed me a couple of vital lessons:
- Stay with what works. Do not disturb what’s functioning unless something is definitively better across the board. Modification brings risk.
- Vet claims completely. Marketing hype around new software program frequently covers larger underlying flaws. Deep due diligence is important.
- Pick simplicity over features. Well-designed tools ought to make your job life easier, not much more challenging and unpleasant.
- Openness develops trust. Nontransparent pricing, questionable reseller terms, and finger-pointing to avert problems damages depend on.
- Seek honest testimonials. Delighted assistance evaluates indicate much less if too much issues suggest bad overall functionality.
- Excellence is difficult. No solitary option can flawlessly meet every special service need. Discover the least-bad fit.
- Advancement over change. Incremental enhancements generally exceed high-risk wholesale reinvention of what already works fine.
In short, I found out to be extra doubtful of “too good to be true” marketing cases and less lured by the attraction of glossy brand-new objects. The tools you make use of daily need to make trust with openness and performance, not slick advertising.