As a company owner for over a decade, I depend on software and automation to enhance procedures and supply results. So when GoHighLevel arised on the scene couple of years back, it most definitely caught my attention GoHighLevel For Auto Dealerships.
The idea was enticing– an all-in-one customer administration platform with marketing, sales, and service devices integrated with each other. As a business owner always looking to simplify and scale my organization, it felt like a dream happened theoretically. Who wouldn’t desire a solitary solution that does it all?
However in this in-depth GoHighLevel testimonial, I’ll take you inside my tragic journey of attempting (and falling short) to change to this prominent new software. You’ll find out:
If you’re thinking about whether GoHighLevel is right for your very own organization needs, ideally you can learn from my painful errors and inflated expectations.
Spoiler: I do NOT recommend GoHighLevel. If you require a CRM, begin with this listing of finest CRMs rather. I use Keap.
Some GoHighLevel Alternatives
If you’re seeking a sales, marketing, and project monitoring option to GoHighLevel, after that here are a few we suggest.
Backstory: Why I Thought About Switching from Keap
To understand what attracted me to GoHighLevel to begin with, you need context concerning my previous configuration. For over 5 years I had been gladly relying upon Keap (formerly Infusionsoft) to fulfill all my customer management and automation demands.
I located Keap user-friendly to utilize and it managed everything I required– CRM, e-mail marketing, sales funnels, subscription websites, and client support.
Keap’s CRM and sales and marketing automation are made to assist local business maintain their customers while adding new ones easily. Automate follow-ups with e-mails and texts, making certain leads and customers obtain the ideal messages at the right time. Usage website and social media kinds to simplify lead follow-up, and handle your growth with simple consultation organizing and lead tracking. Boost sales with automated estimating, invoicing, and payment handling, liberating your time. With Keap, small companies can conserve 10 hours each week and rise profits by 39%. Beginning with a 14-day free trial, no charge card called for.
Why we like Keap
Keap provides a thorough consumer connection management (CRM) and marketing automation remedy customized for small businesses and business owners. We appreciate Keap’s concentrate on improving sales procedures and supporting customer partnerships via powerful automation devices. The system’s all-in-one method integrates CRM, e-mail marketing, invoicing, and job administration, making it particularly attractive for companies aiming to settle their tech stack.
Generally, it just functioned reliably with marginal hassle or maintenance called for. My open and click-through prices were excellent (like 35% fantastic). Automations ran efficiently without issues.
So why on earth was I lured to uproot my whole functional structure from a system that worked to attempt something unverified and untested?
In knowledge I can admit I obtained attracted by the alarm call of “shiny item disorder”. You understand the sensation: when everyone’s talking about a brand-new device that will certainly reinvent your company … The yard often looks greener on the other side, and I wondered whether GoHighLevel could reduce friction factors that I ‘d learned to tolerate over the years with Keap.
I resisted initially, yet a few more stress led me to believe maybe it was time for a change.
The Financial investment: Migrating My Agency to GoHighLevel
Previously this year I made a decision to take the plunge. I enrolled in HighLevel’s Agency plan at $297/month, spending dramatically greater than the $97/month starter expense.
This wasn’t a choice I ignored. I understood switching over systems was going to require migrating all my Keap information and essentially rebuilding my entire tech framework from scratch using all of the GoHighLevel integrations available.
Here’s an introduction of simply a few of the effort needed:
- By hand exporting 20,000+ email client records
- Recreating lots of automations and workflows
- Relocating customer profiles, notes, and project information to the brand-new CRM
- Reconfiguring my Stripe billing integration
- Establishing landing pages, promos, and sales funnels throughout again
- Learning a totally foreign UX and user interface layout
Done in, I invested around 30-40 tedious hours of arrangement work transitioning everything over– and also dealing with lost productivity throughout the button.
But ultimately, it was a calculated investment I was willing to make. I figured some short-term pain would pay off with GoHighLevel offering a better long-term service for my organization, Dripify. Oh how wrong I was …
It just took me regarding a month of hands-on use to recognize I had made a big mistake. The problems began piling up rapidly, until it got to a point I needed to cut my losses and change back to Keap completely.
Allow’s go through the nightmarish troubles I came across.
Protection Issues & Several Bugs
Provided GoHighLevel positioned itself as an all-in-one automation system, I made sure to diligently recreate each and every single workflow from my old Keap account.
These included sequences for onboarding brand-new email clients, onboarding new customers, automating follow-ups for webinar enrollments, sending event reminders, managing membership expirations and far more.
Everything appeared to be functioning penalty … up until unexpectedly it wasn’t. One early morning, I woke up to locate 171 entirely unnecessary emails had actually been sent out to users that must NOT have obtained them. This happened three days in a row, with a various batch of 160 people every day.
I anxiously attempted repairing and reconstructing the automation from square one. But the problem persisted.
When I desperately connected to their support group, they vaguely asserted “web server concerns” were responsible. Yet this explanation really did not make any kind of sense, since the mistakes continued happening each early morning like clockwork unassociated to any type of downtime.
In my mind, this enormous failing was completely undesirable and just didn’t work for my company. I have hundreds of calls relying upon my automated campaigns running efficiently.
So if GoHighLevel was mosting likely to be completely undependable, exactly how could I delegate mission-critical workflows and sensitive client data to their technology?
The unintuitive interface only intensified these problems …
Irritating UX
Coming from Keap where every little thing was seamless and user-friendly, GoHighLevel’s learning contour really felt high and complicated.
Straightforward tasks like editing and enhancing workflows entailed excavating via food selection systems that were all over the place. Key settings were unexplainably spread in entirely different sections. Moving between functions really felt disjointed or complex.
I’ll inform you what I indicate by discussing their funnel builder as an instance. There were 3 separate setups panels to handle general, private, and product configurations. Yet for some insane reason, the web links to gain access to each of these core setups were spread out on contrary sides of the screen. What!?
As someone who values clean, thoughtful style, this seriously annoyed me.
It reinforced that GoHighLevel still felt like a work-in-progress as opposed to a refined item prepared for prime-time usage. Their priorities appeared concentrated on stuffing in every feature under the sun, with poor functionality as an afterthought.
And speaking of features, I quickly recognized the low price tag featured costly concessions …
Deceptive Pricing GoHighLevel For Auto Dealerships
One of GoHighLevel’s biggest selling points is the cost effective rate for access to many features. But I swiftly learned this cheap base expense was deceitful.
They nickle-and-dimed users with sporadic charges for core functionality. Unexpectedly my charge card declarations had vague $10 costs from GoHighLevel occasionally.
As it ended up, you obtain billed whenever you send out an e-mail through their web servers. So for high volume customers, this amounted to numerous dollars in unanticipated costs.
In between these per-email fees and paying extra for deliverability attachments like Mailgun, my “affordable” GoHighLevel subscription wound up costing considerably MORE than my Keap plan.
The low price tag was tempting, but simply not sensible in practice. This bait-and-switch left a bad taste in my mouth.
Email Fees Suffered
The last dealbreaker was seeing my carefully supported e-mail open rates drop virtually overnight after switching over to GoHighLevel.
Formerly, my target market interaction regularly hit 35-40% open rates in Keap month after month. Once I moved their records over to GoHighLevel, performance tanked quickly to a worthless 9% open price.
Despite just how much I optimized my sending practices or attempted every repairing technique, I might barely push open rates back into the teens– still a 50%+ decline from my previous criteria GoHighLevel For Auto Dealerships.
Let me repeat: my exact same audience and emails suddenly had horrible interaction. The only thing I might think that would be creating this was whatever was taking place behind the scenes at GoHighLevel. For an agency so depending on email marketing, this was a big deal.
Between the debilitating deliverability problems, concealed fees, busted features, and dreadful interface, I had actually ultimately reached my limit …
Why I Quit GoHighLevel after 37 Days
Just 45 days after migrating my firm to GoHighLevel, I knew I had actually made a substantial blunder. The disadvantages dramatically exceeded any advantages.
No software is ideal, however the large volume of troubles was beyond acceptable.
At the end of the day, software application comes down to trust. If I can not trust it to handle crucial features competently or think a supplier has my benefits in mind, then it’s time to leave– even after investing substantial time, money, and initiative migrating.
So I made the difficult contact us to turn around training course and return back to Keap totally simply weeks after going done in on GoHighLevel. Allow’s explore what I learned from this ordeal.
Trick Takeaways: What I Picked up from My GoHighLevel Blunder
My time with HighLevel can be summed up as a pricey misadventure. But in knowledge, it educated me a few essential lessons:
- Stay with what works. Don’t upset what’s working unless something is definitively better across the board. Adjustment brings risk.
- Veterinarian asserts thoroughly. Marketing buzz around new software commonly obscures larger underlying defects. Deep due diligence is essential.
- Select simpleness over features. Well-designed tools should make your job life simpler, not extra complicated and messy.
- Transparency constructs count on. Opaque pricing, dubious reseller terms, and finger-pointing to escape problems destroys trust fund.
- Seek impartial reviews. Delighted assistance reviews indicate less if extreme problems suggest poor total use.
- Perfection is impossible. No single service can completely meet every one-of-a-kind company requirement. Discover the least-bad fit.
- Advancement over transformation. Step-by-step enhancements typically surpass risky wholesale reinvention of what already functions penalty.
Basically, I found out to be a lot more unconvinced of “too good to be real” marketing insurance claims and much less lured by the allure of shiny brand-new objects. The devices you use daily must gain depend on through transparency and efficiency, not glossy advertising.