As a company proprietor for over a decade, I count on software application and automation to enhance procedures and supply results. So when GoHighLevel arised on the scene couple of years back, it absolutely captured my interest GoHighLevel Family Lawyer Playbook.
The concept was enticing– an all-in-one client administration platform with marketing, sales, and solution tools incorporated with each other. As a business owner constantly seeking to streamline and scale my organization, it felt like a desire happened theoretically. That would not desire a solitary option that does it all?
However in this in-depth GoHighLevel review, I’ll take you inside my tragic journey of attempting (and falling short) to switch over to this popular new software. You’ll discover:
If you’re thinking about whether GoHighLevel is right for your own business requirements, ideally you can pick up from my unpleasant errors and blew up expectations.
Looter: I do NOT advise GoHighLevel. If you need a CRM, start with this checklist of finest CRMs rather. I utilize Keap.
Some GoHighLevel Alternatives
If you’re looking for a sales, marketing, and task monitoring choice to GoHighLevel, after that below are a couple of we recommend.
Backstory: Why I Took Into Consideration Switching Over from Keap
To comprehend what attracted me to GoHighLevel in the first place, you require context regarding my previous arrangement. For over 5 years I had been gladly counting on Keap (previously Infusionsoft) to satisfy all my customer administration and automation demands.
I discovered Keap intuitive to utilize and it took care of everything I needed– CRM, email marketing, sales funnels, membership sites, and client support.
Keap’s CRM and sales and marketing automation are made to help small businesses keep their customers while including brand-new ones effortlessly. Automate follow-ups with e-mails and messages, guaranteeing leads and customers obtain the right messages at the correct time. Use website and social media sites types to improve lead follow-up, and manage your growth with simple appointment scheduling and lead tracking. Boost sales with automated pricing quote, invoicing, and repayment processing, maximizing your time. With Keap, small businesses can conserve 10 hours each week and boost profits by 39%. Beginning with a 14-day free trial, no credit card needed.
Why we like Keap
Keap provides an extensive consumer connection monitoring (CRM) and marketing automation option tailored for local business and business owners. We value Keap’s concentrate on simplifying sales procedures and nurturing customer relationships with powerful automation devices. The platform’s all-in-one technique combines CRM, email marketing, invoicing, and task monitoring, making it particularly eye-catching for organizations looking to consolidate their technology stack.
Generally, it just functioned accurately with minimal difficulty or upkeep called for. My open and click-through rates were wonderful (like 35% terrific). Automations ran efficiently with no problems.
So why on earth was I tempted to uproot my entire functional structure from a system that functioned to try something unverified and untried?
In knowledge I can confess I obtained seduced by the alarm phone call of “glossy object syndrome”. You know the feeling: when everybody’s discussing a brand-new tool that will certainly change your business … The yard commonly looks greener on the other side, and I asked yourself whether GoHighLevel may decrease rubbing points that I would certainly discovered to endure for many years with Keap.
I withstood in the beginning, but a couple of more irritations led me to assume perhaps it was time for a modification.
The Financial investment: Moving My Company to GoHighLevel
Previously this year I made a decision to take the plunge. I signed up for HighLevel’s Company plan at $297/month, investing considerably greater than the $97/month starter cost.
This had not been a decision I ignored. I knew switching systems was going to require migrating all my Keap data and essentially reconstructing my entire technology framework from square one using every one of the GoHighLevel integrations readily available.
Right here’s a summary of simply some of the initiative required:
- By hand exporting 20,000+ email client documents
- Recreating lots of automations and workflows
- Relocating customer profiles, notes, and project data to the brand-new CRM
- Reconfiguring my Stripe invoicing integration
- Setting up landing pages, discounts, and sales funnels all over once again
- Learning an entirely foreign UX and interface layout
Done in, I invested around 30-40 tiresome hours of arrangement job transitioning everything over– and also managing lost performance during the switch.
But inevitably, it was a computed financial investment I agreed to make. I figured some short-term pain would certainly repay with GoHighLevel supplying a far better lasting service for my company, Dripify. Oh how wrong I was …
It only took me concerning a month of hands-on use to recognize I had actually made a huge blunder. The concerns began accumulating quickly, till it reached a point I had to reduce my losses and switch over back to Keap totally.
Allow’s go through the nightmarish issues I came across.
Security Issues & Numerous Vermin
Offered GoHighLevel positioned itself as an all-in-one automation system, I made sure to thoroughly recreate each and every single workflow from my old Keap account.
These consisted of series for onboarding brand-new email subscribers, onboarding brand-new clients, automating follow-ups for webinar enrollments, sending event reminders, handling subscription expiries and a lot more.
Whatever appeared to be operating penalty … till unexpectedly it wasn’t. One early morning, I woke up to discover 171 totally pointless e-mails had actually been sent to individuals who should NOT have actually obtained them. This took place three days in a row, with a different set of 160 people every day.
I hysterically tried fixing and restoring the automation from scratch. But the issue continued.
When I seriously reached out to their support team, they slightly asserted “web server problems” were to blame. Yet this description really did not make any type of sense, considering that the mistakes proceeded taking place each early morning like clockwork unconnected to any downtime.
In my mind, this large failure was completely undesirable and simply didn’t work for my service. I have hundreds of contacts relying on my automated campaigns running efficiently.
So if GoHighLevel was mosting likely to be completely unstable, just how could I turn over mission-critical workflows and delicate customer information to their modern technology?
The unintuitive user interface only intensified these problems …
Aggravating UX
Originating from Keap where everything was seamless and user-friendly, GoHighLevel’s learning contour really felt high and complex.
Simple jobs like modifying workflows included digging via food selection systems that were all over the place. Trick setups were unexplainably spread in totally various areas. Relocating between features really felt disjointed or complex.
I’ll tell you what I imply by discussing their funnel builder as an example. There were 3 separate setups panels to take care of total, individual, and item configurations. Yet for some crazy factor, the links to access each of these core settings were expanded on opposite sides of the screen. What!?
As someone that values clean, thoughtful design, this seriously frustrated me.
It reinforced that GoHighLevel still seemed like a work-in-progress rather than a sleek item prepared for prime-time use. Their concerns seemed concentrated on stuffing in every feature under the sun, with inadequate usability as an afterthought.
And talking features, I soon understood the small cost tag featured costly compromises …
Deceptive Pricing GoHighLevel Family Lawyer Playbook
One of GoHighLevel’s largest selling factors is the affordable price for access to numerous features. Yet I swiftly discovered this affordable base expense was deceitful.
They nickle-and-dimed individuals with occasional costs for core capability. Suddenly my charge card statements had vague $10 costs from GoHighLevel here and there.
As it turned out, you get charged every time you send out an e-mail with their web servers. So for high quantity individuals, this amounted to numerous dollars in unforeseen expenses.
In between these per-email costs and paying added for deliverability add-ons like Mailgun, my “economical” GoHighLevel membership ended up setting you back substantially MORE than my Keap plan.
The reduced price tag was tempting, yet simply not sensible in practice. This bait-and-switch left a negative preference in my mouth.
Email Rates Suffered
The last dealbreaker was seeing my meticulously nurtured email open rates drop nearly overnight after switching to GoHighLevel.
Formerly, my audience interaction regularly hit 35-40% open prices in Keap month after month. Once I migrated their documents over to GoHighLevel, efficiency tanked instantly to a worthless 9% open rate.
No matter just how much I maximized my sending practices or attempted every repairing method, I could hardly nudge open rates back into the teens– still a 50%+ decrease from my previous standards GoHighLevel Family Lawyer Playbook.
Let me repeat: my exact same audience and emails suddenly had awful involvement. The only thing I might believe that would certainly be triggering this was whatever was taking place behind the scenes at GoHighLevel. For an agency so based on email marketing, this was a big deal.
In between the crippling deliverability issues, concealed charges, busted features, and terrible interface, I had actually finally reached my limit …
Why I Stop GoHighLevel after 37 Days
Just 45 days after moving my firm to GoHighLevel, I knew I had made a huge blunder. The cons significantly outweighed any type of advantages.
No software is excellent, however the large volume of problems was beyond appropriate.
At the end of the day, software boils down to count on. If I can’t trust it to deal with important functions competently or believe a vendor has my benefits in mind, after that it’s time to walk away– also after investing considerable time, cash, and effort migrating.
So I made the hard call to turn around training course and return back to Keap totally just weeks after going done in on GoHighLevel. Allow’s discover what I learned from this ordeal.
Key Takeaways: What I Learned From My GoHighLevel Blunder
My time with HighLevel can be summarized as a pricey accident. Yet in knowledge, it taught me a few crucial lessons:
- Stick to what jobs. Don’t distress what’s functioning unless something is definitively far better across the board. Change brings threat.
- Veterinarian declares extensively. Marketing buzz around brand-new software commonly covers larger underlying imperfections. Deep due diligence is essential.
- Choose simpleness over features. Well-designed devices ought to make your job life much easier, not extra difficult and untidy.
- Openness constructs trust fund. Nontransparent pricing, dubious reseller terms, and finger-pointing to avert issues damages count on.
- Look for unbiased reviews. Happy assistance reviews imply less if excessive problems indicate poor overall functionality.
- Perfection is impossible. No single service can perfectly meet every unique company requirement. Find the least-bad fit.
- Evolution over transformation. Incremental improvements generally exceed dangerous wholesale reinvention of what already functions fine.
Basically, I learned to be more unconvinced of “also great to be real” marketing cases and much less attracted by the allure of shiny brand-new objects. The devices you use daily must make count on with openness and efficiency, not glossy advertising.