As an agency proprietor for over a years, I rely upon software application and automation to simplify operations and provide results. So when GoHighLevel emerged on the scene couple of years back, it most definitely caught my interest GoHighLevel Consulting Team.
The idea was appealing– an all-in-one customer management system with marketing, sales, and service devices integrated together. As an entrepreneur always seeking to streamline and scale my service, it seemed like a dream come true theoretically. That would not want a solitary remedy that does it all?
Yet in this comprehensive GoHighLevel evaluation, I’ll take you inside my dreadful trip of attempting (and falling short) to change to this preferred brand-new software application. You’ll learn:
If you’re thinking about whether GoHighLevel is right for your own business needs, ideally you can gain from my excruciating errors and inflated expectations.
Spoiler: I do NOT recommend GoHighLevel. If you require a CRM, begin with this listing of finest CRMs instead. I use Keap.
Some GoHighLevel Alternatives
If you’re looking for a sales, marketing, and task monitoring choice to GoHighLevel, then below are a couple of we suggest.
Backstory: Why I Considered Switching Over from Keap
To understand what attracted me to GoHighLevel to begin with, you need context regarding my previous arrangement. For over 5 years I had actually been gladly counting on Keap (formerly Infusionsoft) to satisfy all my client management and automation demands.
I discovered Keap intuitive to use and it took care of every little thing I required– CRM, email marketing, sales funnels, subscription websites, and client support.
Keap’s CRM and sales and marketing automation are made to help local business maintain their customers while including new ones easily. Automate follow-ups with emails and texts, ensuring leads and customers get the right messages at the right time. Usage website and social networks types to simplify lead follow-up, and manage your development with simple appointment organizing and lead monitoring. Boost sales with automated quoting, invoicing, and settlement processing, maximizing your time. With Keap, small companies can save 10 hours weekly and boost revenue by 39%. Begin with a 14-day free trial, no bank card required.
Why we like Keap
Keap offers a comprehensive customer connection management (CRM) and marketing automation service customized for small companies and business owners. We appreciate Keap’s concentrate on streamlining sales procedures and nurturing consumer connections with powerful automation tools. The platform’s all-in-one strategy integrates CRM, e-mail marketing, invoicing, and job administration, making it particularly appealing for companies seeking to settle their technology stack.
Generally, it simply functioned reliably with minimal difficulty or maintenance needed. My open and click-through prices were fantastic (like 35% excellent). Automations ran smoothly without any concerns.
So why in the world was I tempted to uproot my whole operational foundation from a system that functioned to attempt something unverified and untested?
In knowledge I can admit I obtained attracted by the siren telephone call of “glossy object disorder”. You understand the sensation: when every person’s discussing a new device that will certainly revolutionize your organization … The grass commonly looks greener on the other side, and I asked yourself whether GoHighLevel could reduce rubbing points that I ‘d discovered to tolerate for many years with Keap.
I withstood initially, yet a couple of even more frustrations led me to assume possibly it was time for an adjustment.
The Financial investment: Migrating My Company to GoHighLevel
Earlier this year I chose to start. I registered for HighLevel’s Agency plan at $297/month, investing significantly greater than the $97/month starter cost.
This had not been a choice I took lightly. I understood changing systems was mosting likely to call for moving all my Keap information and basically reconstructing my whole tech framework from the ground up using every one of the GoHighLevel integrations available.
Here’s a summary of just some of the initiative needed:
- Manually exporting 20,000+ email customer documents
- Recreating dozens of automations and workflows
- Relocating client accounts, notes, and task information to the brand-new CRM
- Reconfiguring my Stripe billing integration
- Establishing landing pages, coupons, and sales funnels around once again
- Learning a completely international UX and user interface style
Done in, I invested around 30-40 laborious hours of setup work transitioning every little thing over– as well as handling lost productivity throughout the switch.
However inevitably, it was a computed financial investment I was willing to make. I figured some temporary pain would repay with GoHighLevel providing a better long-lasting service for my organization, Dripify. Oh how incorrect I was …
It only took me regarding a month of hands-on usage to realize I had actually made a large mistake. The issues began piling up quickly, up until it got to a point I had to cut my losses and switch back to Keap entirely.
Let’s walk through the horrible troubles I ran into.
Safety And Security Issues & Several Bugs
Provided GoHighLevel positioned 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 consisted of sequences for onboarding brand-new e-mail subscribers, onboarding brand-new customers, automating follow-ups for webinar registrations, sending out event pointers, handling subscription expirations and far more.
Whatever seemed to be operating fine … until unexpectedly it wasn’t. One early morning, I awoke to locate 171 entirely pointless e-mails had been sent to individuals that should NOT have actually received them. This happened 3 days in a row, with a various set of 160 people each day.
I hysterically attempted fixing and reconstructing the automation from the ground up. Yet the problem persisted.
When I seriously reached out to their assistance team, they slightly declared “server problems” were to blame. Yet this description didn’t make any type of sense, considering that the errors proceeded occurring each morning like clockwork unconnected to any downtime.
In my mind, this huge failure was completely undesirable and simply didn’t benefit my organization. I have hundreds of calls relying on my automated campaigns running smoothly.
So if GoHighLevel was mosting likely to be absolutely undependable, how could I leave mission-critical workflows and delicate customer data to their modern technology?
The unintuitive interface just compounded these concerns …
Frustrating UX
Originating from Keap where everything was seamless and instinctive, GoHighLevel’s learning curve felt steep and difficult.
Basic jobs like editing and enhancing workflows entailed digging with menu systems that were all over the place. Key settings were unexplainably scattered in entirely different sections. Moving between features really felt disjointed or complicated.
I’ll inform you what I mean by speaking about their funnel builder as an example. There were 3 different setups panels to manage general, private, and item configurations. Yet for some crazy factor, the web links to access each of these core setups were expanded on contrary sides of the screen. What!?
As someone who values clean, thoughtful layout, this seriously annoyed me.
It enhanced that GoHighLevel still seemed like a work-in-progress rather than a refined product all set for prime-time usage. Their concerns appeared concentrated on stuffing in every feature under the sun, with bad use as an afterthought.
And talking features, I quickly recognized the affordable price tag featured expensive compromises …
Misleading Pricing GoHighLevel Consulting Team
One of GoHighLevel’s most significant selling factors is the economical price for access to a lot of features. However I promptly learned this inexpensive base expense was misleading.
They nickle-and-dimed customers with occasional costs for core functionality. All of a sudden my credit card declarations had vague $10 costs from GoHighLevel occasionally.
As it turned out, you get billed every single time you send out an e-mail via their web servers. So for high quantity 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 “inexpensive” GoHighLevel registration ended up costing significantly greater than my Keap plan.
The low price tag was alluring, however just not practical in practice. This bait-and-switch left a poor taste in my mouth.
Email Fees Suffered
The last dealbreaker was seeing my very carefully nurtured e-mail open rates plummet almost over night after switching over to GoHighLevel.
Formerly, my audience interaction regularly struck 35-40% open rates in Keap month after month. Once I migrated their documents over to GoHighLevel, efficiency tanked quickly to a pitiful 9% open price.
No matter how much I enhanced my sending out practices or tried every troubleshooting trick, I might barely push open rates back into the teens– still a 50%+ decrease from my previous standards GoHighLevel Consulting Team.
Let me repeat: my exact same target market and e-mails suddenly had terrible engagement. The only thing I could believe that would certainly be creating this was whatever was occurring behind the scenes at GoHighLevel. For a firm so depending on e-mail marketing, this was a big deal.
Between the debilitating deliverability issues, concealed costs, busted features, and awful user interface, I had actually ultimately reached my limitation …
Why I Stop GoHighLevel after 37 Days
Simply 45 days after moving my firm to GoHighLevel, I knew I had made a substantial mistake. The cons considerably surpassed any type of advantages.
No software program is best, but the large quantity of troubles was beyond acceptable.
At the end of the day, software boils down to count on. If I can not trust it to deal with essential functions effectively or believe a supplier has my best interests in mind, after that it’s time to walk away– even after investing substantial time, money, and effort moving.
So I made the difficult contact us to reverse course and return back to Keap completely just weeks after going done in on GoHighLevel. Let’s discover what I picked up from this ordeal.
Trick Takeaways: What I Gained from My GoHighLevel Mistake
My time with HighLevel can be summarized as an expensive accident. Yet in hindsight, it educated me a few essential lessons:
- Stick to what works. Don’t disturb what’s functioning unless something is definitively much better across the board. Change brings risk.
- Veterinarian asserts extensively. Marketing hype around brand-new software program frequently obscures bigger underlying defects. Deep due diligence is crucial.
- Choose simplicity over features. Properly designed devices need to make your work life easier, not a lot more difficult and untidy.
- Openness builds trust. Nontransparent pricing, questionable reseller terms, and finger-pointing to evade issues ruins depend on.
- Look for impartial testimonials. Satisfied assistance reviews mean much less if too much issues indicate bad total use.
- Perfection is impossible. No solitary remedy can completely satisfy every distinct company requirement. Discover the least-bad fit.
- Advancement over change. Step-by-step improvements usually exceed high-risk wholesale reinvention of what currently works penalty.
In other words, I discovered to be more hesitant of “as well good to be real” marketing cases and much less tempted by the allure of glossy brand-new objects. The devices you utilize daily should earn trust with openness and efficiency, not slick advertising.