As an agency owner for over a years, I depend on software and automation to enhance operations and provide results. So when GoHighLevel emerged on the scene couple of years back, it absolutely caught my attention GoHighLevel For Car Dealerships.
The concept was attractive– an all-in-one client management platform with marketing, sales, and service devices incorporated together. As a business owner always wanting to streamline and scale my service, it appeared like a dream happened on paper. Who would not want a solitary service that does it all?
But in this in-depth GoHighLevel evaluation, I’ll take you inside my tragic journey of attempting (and stopping working) to change to this preferred brand-new software application. You’ll discover:
If you’re thinking about whether GoHighLevel is right for your very own business requirements, ideally you can learn from my agonizing errors and inflated expectations.
Spoiler: I do NOT recommend GoHighLevel. If you require a CRM, begin with this checklist of ideal CRMs rather. I use Keap.
Some GoHighLevel Alternatives
If you’re looking for a sales, marketing, and task monitoring option to GoHighLevel, then here are a few 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 concerning my previous setup. For over 5 years I had actually been gladly relying upon Keap (formerly Infusionsoft) to fulfill all my client monitoring and automation demands.
I located Keap instinctive to make use of and it handled everything I required– CRM, e-mail marketing, sales funnels, subscription websites, and client support.
Keap’s CRM and sales and marketing automation are designed to aid small companies maintain their clients while adding brand-new ones easily. Automate follow-ups with emails and texts, ensuring leads and customers obtain the best messages at the right time. Usage website and social networks kinds to simplify lead follow-up, and handle your growth with easy consultation scheduling and lead tracking. Boost sales with automated estimating, invoicing, and payment processing, freeing up your time. With Keap, local business can conserve 10 hours per week and rise profits by 39%. Beginning with a 14-day free trial, no charge card needed.
Why we like Keap
Keap supplies an extensive consumer partnership monitoring (CRM) and marketing automation service tailored for small companies and business owners. We appreciate Keap’s concentrate on simplifying sales processes and nurturing consumer relationships via powerful automation tools. The platform’s all-in-one method combines CRM, email marketing, invoicing, and task management, making it specifically appealing for businesses wanting to consolidate their technology pile.
Generally, it simply functioned accurately with minimal fuss or maintenance required. My open and click-through prices were great (like 35% fantastic). Automations ran smoothly without any issues.
So why on earth was I attracted to uproot my whole operational foundation from a system that functioned to try something unproven and untried?
In hindsight I can confess I got seduced by the siren telephone call of “shiny item syndrome”. You recognize the sensation: when every person’s speaking about a brand-new tool that will change your organization … The grass commonly looks greener on the other side, and I asked yourself whether GoHighLevel might minimize rubbing factors that I ‘d discovered to endure throughout the years with Keap.
I withstood at first, yet a few more aggravations led me to assume maybe it was time for an adjustment.
The Investment: Migrating My Agency to GoHighLevel
Earlier this year I made a decision to start. I signed up for HighLevel’s Firm plan at $297/month, spending significantly greater than the $97/month starter cost.
This had not been a choice I ignored. I understood switching over systems was going to need migrating all my Keap data and essentially restoring my entire technology infrastructure from the ground up using every one of the GoHighLevel integrations readily available.
Below’s a review of simply a few of the effort called for:
- Manually exporting 20,000+ email subscriber documents
- Recreating dozens of automations and workflows
- Moving client profiles, notes, and job data to the new CRM
- Reconfiguring my Stripe invoicing integration
- Establishing landing pages, discounts, and sales funnels throughout again
- Learning an entirely international UX and user interface design
All in, I invested around 30-40 tedious hours of setup job transitioning everything over– not to mention handling shed efficiency during the button.
However inevitably, it was a computed investment I wanted to make. I figured some temporary pain would pay off with GoHighLevel offering a much better long-term option for my organization, Dripify. Oh just how incorrect I was …
It only took me regarding a month of hands-on usage to recognize I had made a huge error. The issues began accumulating quickly, up until it reached a point I needed to cut my losses and switch over back to Keap entirely.
Allow’s go through the nightmarish problems I came across.
Security Issues & Several Vermin
Provided GoHighLevel placed itself as an all-in-one automation system, I took care to thoroughly recreate every workflow from my old Keap account.
These consisted of series for onboarding brand-new e-mail clients, onboarding new clients, automating follow-ups for webinar enrollments, sending event suggestions, taking care of membership expiries and far more.
Every little thing appeared to be functioning fine … until instantly it had not been. One morning, I awoke to find 171 entirely unimportant e-mails had been sent to customers who should NOT have actually obtained them. This took place 3 days straight, with a various set of 160 people daily.
I frantically attempted repairing and rebuilding the automation from square one. Yet the issue lingered.
When I desperately reached out to their assistance group, they slightly asserted “server issues” were to blame. But this description really did not make any type of feeling, because the mistakes proceeded taking place each morning like clockwork unconnected to any downtime.
In my mind, this enormous failure was completely inappropriate and simply really did not benefit my company. I have hundreds of contacts relying on my automated campaigns running smoothly.
So if GoHighLevel was going to be totally undependable, exactly how could I delegate mission-critical workflows and sensitive client information to their technology?
The unintuitive user interface just compounded these problems …
Aggravating UX
Originating from Keap where whatever was seamless and intuitive, GoHighLevel’s learning contour felt high and complex.
Simple tasks like editing workflows entailed digging via menu systems that were all over the place. Key settings were unexplainably scattered in entirely various areas. Moving in between features really felt disjointed or complex.
I’ll inform you what I indicate by talking about their funnel builder as an example. There were 3 different settings panels to handle overall, private, and product setups. Yet for some insane reason, the links to access each of these core settings were spread out on contrary sides of the screen. What!?
As a person that values clean, thoughtful style, this seriously irritated me.
It enhanced that GoHighLevel still felt like a work-in-progress rather than a sleek product ready for prime-time usage. Their concerns appeared focused on stuffing in every feature under the sun, with bad functionality as an afterthought.
And talking features, I quickly understood the affordable price tag included costly compromises …
Deceptive Pricing GoHighLevel For Car Dealerships
One of GoHighLevel’s most significant selling factors is the budget friendly rate for access to many features. Yet I quickly discovered this cheap base cost was misleading.
They nickle-and-dimed users with occasional charges for core functionality. Instantly my credit card statements had vague $10 fees from GoHighLevel occasionally.
As it turned out, you get billed every single time you send an e-mail through their web servers. So for high volume individuals, this added up to thousands of bucks in unforeseen prices.
In between these per-email costs and paying additional for deliverability add-ons like Mailgun, my “cost effective” GoHighLevel membership wound up costing substantially MORE than my Keap plan.
The low price tag was tempting, however just not realistic in practice. This bait-and-switch left a negative preference in my mouth.
Email Fees Suffered
The last dealbreaker was seeing my meticulously nurtured e-mail open rates drop nearly over night after switching over to GoHighLevel.
Formerly, my target market interaction constantly struck 35-40% open rates in Keap month after month. But once I moved their documents over to GoHighLevel, performance tanked instantly to a pathetic 9% open price.
Despite how much I optimized my sending techniques or tried every troubleshooting trick, I can barely nudge open prices back into the teenagers– still a 50%+ decline from my previous benchmarks GoHighLevel For Car Dealerships.
Let me repeat: my exact same audience and emails suddenly had horrible involvement. The only thing I can assume that would be triggering this was whatever was happening behind the scenes at GoHighLevel. For a company so depending on email marketing, this was a big deal.
Between the debilitating deliverability issues, hidden charges, busted features, and horrible interface, I had finally reached my limit …
Why I Give up GoHighLevel after 37 Days
Just 45 days after moving my company to GoHighLevel, I understood I had made a big blunder. The cons substantially exceeded any kind of benefits.
No software application is excellent, yet the large quantity of troubles was beyond acceptable.
At the end of the day, software application boils down to count on. If I can not trust it to deal with essential features competently or believe a vendor has my benefits in mind, then it’s time to leave– also after spending substantial time, money, and initiative moving.
So I made the hard call to reverse training course and return back to Keap totally simply weeks after going done in on GoHighLevel. Allow’s discover what I picked up from this debacle.
Secret Takeaways: What I Picked up from My GoHighLevel Error
My time with HighLevel can be summed up as an expensive accident. Yet in hindsight, it showed me a couple of vital lessons:
- Stick to what jobs. Don’t disturb what’s working unless something is definitively much better across the board. Adjustment brings risk.
- Vet asserts completely. Marketing buzz around brand-new software program typically obscures bigger underlying flaws. Deep due persistance is essential.
- Select simpleness over features. Properly designed tools ought to make your job life easier, not a lot more challenging and unpleasant.
- Openness builds count on. Nontransparent pricing, questionable reseller terms, and finger-pointing to evade issues destroys depend on.
- Look for honest reviews. Pleased assistance evaluates suggest much less if too much issues indicate inadequate total functionality.
- Perfection is impossible. No single option can completely meet every one-of-a-kind service need. Locate the least-bad fit.
- Advancement over revolution. Step-by-step improvements generally surpass risky wholesale reinvention of what currently functions fine.
In other words, I found out to be a lot more skeptical of “too great to be real” marketing insurance claims and less tempted by the allure of shiny brand-new objects. The devices you use daily need to make depend on through transparency and performance, not glossy advertising.