As a firm proprietor for over a years, I count on software application and automation to enhance operations and provide outcomes. So when GoHighLevel emerged on the scene few years back, it most definitely captured my interest GoHighLevel Conference.
The idea was appealing– an all-in-one customer management system with marketing, sales, and solution tools integrated together. As a business owner always aiming to streamline and scale my organization, it seemed like a desire come true theoretically. Who wouldn’t want a solitary service that does it all?
However in this thorough GoHighLevel review, I’ll take you inside my tragic journey of attempting (and falling short) to switch over to this popular brand-new software. You’ll find out:
If you’re considering whether GoHighLevel is right for your own organization needs, hopefully you can pick up from my agonizing blunders and blew up assumptions.
Looter: I do NOT advise GoHighLevel. If you require a CRM, start with this checklist of ideal CRMs rather. I utilize Keap.
Some GoHighLevel Alternatives
If you’re trying to find a sales, marketing, and project management alternative to GoHighLevel, after that right here are a couple of we suggest.
Backstory: Why I Took Into Consideration Switching Over from Keap
To comprehend what attracted me to GoHighLevel to begin with, you need context about my previous arrangement. For over 5 years I had been happily depending on Keap (previously Infusionsoft) to fulfill all my client management and automation needs.
I found Keap instinctive to make use of and it took care of everything I required– CRM, email marketing, sales funnels, subscription websites, and customer support.
Keap’s CRM and sales and marketing automation are developed to aid small businesses keep their clients while adding new ones easily. Automate follow-ups with e-mails and texts, making sure leads and customers obtain the ideal messages at the right time. Usage web site and social media kinds to enhance lead follow-up, and handle your development with simple visit scheduling and lead tracking. Boost sales with automated pricing estimate, invoicing, and settlement handling, maximizing your time. With Keap, local business can conserve 10 hours per week and increase income by 39%. Beginning with a 14-day free trial, no credit card called for.
Why we like Keap
Keap offers a thorough client partnership monitoring (CRM) and marketing automation solution tailored for local business and entrepreneurs. We value Keap’s focus on improving sales processes and supporting client partnerships through effective automation tools. The system’s all-in-one strategy incorporates CRM, email marketing, invoicing, and task management, making it especially appealing for organizations looking to settle their tech pile.
Essentially, it simply worked reliably with minimal difficulty or upkeep called for. My open and click-through prices were great (like 35% great). Automations ran smoothly with no issues.
So why in the world was I tempted to uproot my whole functional foundation from a system that functioned to try something unproven and untested?
In knowledge I can confess I got attracted by the siren phone call of “shiny things syndrome”. You understand the sensation: when everybody’s speaking about a new tool that will transform your business … The grass typically looks greener on the other side, and I questioned whether GoHighLevel may minimize friction factors that I ‘d found out to endure over the years with Keap.
I stood up to initially, yet a few even more disappointments led me to assume possibly it was time for a modification.
The Investment: Moving My Company to GoHighLevel
Previously this year I determined to start. I enrolled in HighLevel’s Company plan at $297/month, investing substantially greater than the $97/month starter price.
This had not been a decision I ignored. I understood switching platforms was going to require moving all my Keap information and basically reconstructing my entire tech infrastructure from square one making use of every one of the GoHighLevel integrations readily available.
Right here’s a summary of just a few of the effort required:
- Manually exporting 20,000+ e-mail subscriber records
- Recreating dozens 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 once again
- Learning a totally foreign UX and user interface design
Done in, I invested around 30-40 tedious hours of setup job transitioning everything over– and also taking care of lost productivity during the button.
Yet ultimately, it was a computed financial investment I agreed to make. I figured some short-term discomfort would settle with GoHighLevel supplying a much better long-lasting option for my company, Dripify. Oh just how wrong I was …
It only took me regarding a month of hands-on usage to understand I had actually made a huge mistake. The issues started piling up swiftly, up until it got to a point I needed to reduce my losses and switch back to Keap totally.
Allow’s go through the nightmarish troubles I came across.
Security Issues & Several Bugs
Provided GoHighLevel positioned itself as an all-in-one automation system, I took care to thoroughly recreate each and every single workflow from my old Keap account.
These consisted of series for onboarding brand-new email clients, onboarding new clients, automating follow-ups for webinar enrollments, sending occasion reminders, managing membership expiries and much more.
Whatever seemed to be operating fine … till suddenly it wasn’t. One early morning, I woke up to find 171 totally unnecessary e-mails had been sent out to individuals who ought to NOT have actually obtained them. This occurred 3 days in a row, with a various batch of 160 people every day.
I hysterically tried troubleshooting and restoring the automation from square one. But the trouble persisted.
When I desperately reached out to their support group, they slightly asserted “server issues” were at fault. But this explanation really did not make any type of sense, given that the errors continued occurring each early morning like clockwork unrelated to any type of downtime.
In my mind, this massive failure was completely inappropriate and just didn’t work for my business. I have hundreds of contacts depending on my automated campaigns running efficiently.
So if GoHighLevel was mosting likely to be completely unreliable, just how could I entrust mission-critical workflows and sensitive customer information to their innovation?
The unintuitive user interface only compounded these concerns …
Discouraging UX
Originating from Keap where whatever was smooth and instinctive, GoHighLevel’s learning curve felt high and complex.
Basic jobs like editing and enhancing workflows included excavating through menu systems that were all over the place. Secret setups were unexplainably spread in totally different sections. Moving in between functions really felt disjointed or complex.
I’ll inform you what I indicate by speaking about their funnel builder as an example. There were 3 different setups panels to handle overall, individual, and item configurations. Yet for some insane factor, the web links to gain access to each of these core settings were expanded on opposite sides of the screen. What!?
As a person that values clean, thoughtful design, this seriously annoyed me.
It strengthened that GoHighLevel still seemed like a work-in-progress instead of a sleek item ready for prime-time usage. Their concerns seemed focused on packing in every feature imaginable, with inadequate functionality as a second thought.
And speaking of features, I quickly recognized the small cost tag came with costly concessions …
Deceptive Pricing GoHighLevel Conference
Among GoHighLevel’s most significant marketing factors is the inexpensive rate for accessibility to a lot of features. However I quickly discovered this low-cost base price was deceptive.
They nickle-and-dimed individuals with erratic costs for core performance. Suddenly my bank card statements had obscure $10 fees from GoHighLevel occasionally.
As it turned out, you obtain charged every single time you send an e-mail through their servers. So for high volume customers, this added up to hundreds of dollars in unanticipated expenses.
Between these per-email fees and paying additional for deliverability add-ons like Mailgun, my “budget friendly” GoHighLevel subscription ended up setting you back dramatically MORE than my Keap plan.
The low sticker price was appealing, however simply not reasonable in practice. This bait-and-switch left a bad preference in my mouth.
Email Fees Suffered
The final dealbreaker was seeing my carefully nurtured email open prices drop virtually overnight after switching over to GoHighLevel.
Previously, my audience interaction regularly hit 35-40% open rates in Keap month after month. Once I moved their records over to GoHighLevel, performance tanked immediately to a useless 9% open price.
Regardless of just how much I enhanced my sending out methods or tried every troubleshooting technique, I can barely push open prices back right into the teens– still a 50%+ decline from my previous standards GoHighLevel Conference.
Let me repeat: my exact same audience and emails unexpectedly had awful involvement. The only thing I could assume that would be causing this was whatever was taking place behind the scenes at GoHighLevel. For a company so dependent on e-mail marketing, this was a big deal.
Between the crippling deliverability concerns, hidden charges, damaged features, and horrible interface, I had actually lastly reached my limitation …
Why I Give up GoHighLevel after 37 Days
Simply 45 days after moving my firm to GoHighLevel, I understood I had actually made a huge blunder. The cons substantially outweighed any kind of benefits.
No software is ideal, yet the sheer quantity of troubles was past appropriate.
At the end of the day, software comes down to trust fund. If I can’t trust it to deal with critical functions competently or believe a vendor has my benefits in mind, then it’s time to walk away– also after investing substantial time, cash, and effort migrating.
So I made the challenging contact us to turn around program and return back to Keap totally just weeks after going done in on GoHighLevel. Let’s discover what I gained from this debacle.
Secret Takeaways: What I Picked up from My GoHighLevel Blunder
My time with HighLevel can be summarized as an expensive accident. Yet in hindsight, it educated me a few essential lessons:
- Stick to what jobs. Don’t disturb what’s working unless something is definitively better across the board. Adjustment brings risk.
- Veterinarian claims thoroughly. Marketing buzz around new software usually obscures bigger underlying problems. Deep due diligence is vital.
- Choose simpleness over features. Well-designed devices should make your work life less complicated, not extra challenging and messy.
- Openness constructs trust. Opaque pricing, unethical reseller terms, and finger-pointing to evade issues destroys depend on.
- Look for unbiased testimonials. Delighted support examines indicate less if too much concerns suggest inadequate total functionality.
- Perfection is difficult. No single service can perfectly fulfill every distinct business need. Locate the least-bad fit.
- Evolution over revolution. Step-by-step renovations commonly exceed risky wholesale reinvention of what currently works fine.
In short, I learned to be more hesitant of “also great to be true” marketing insurance claims and much less attracted by the allure of glossy new things. The tools you make use of daily should make count on through transparency and efficiency, not slick advertising.