As an agency owner for over a decade, I rely on software program and automation to enhance operations and deliver outcomes. So when GoHighLevel emerged on the scene couple of years back, it certainly caught my focus GoHighLevel For Consultants.
The idea was appealing– an all-in-one customer administration system with marketing, sales, and solution tools incorporated together. As an entrepreneur constantly aiming to streamline and scale my organization, it seemed like a desire come to life theoretically. Who wouldn’t desire a single remedy that does it all?
Yet in this in-depth GoHighLevel review, I’ll take you inside my disastrous trip of attempting (and falling short) to switch over to this popular brand-new software program. You’ll discover:
If you’re thinking about whether GoHighLevel is right for your own service requirements, with any luck you can pick up from my painful errors and pumped up expectations.
Looter: I do NOT suggest GoHighLevel. If you need a CRM, begin with this listing of best CRMs instead. I utilize Keap.
Some GoHighLevel Alternatives
If you’re trying to find a sales, marketing, and task management option to GoHighLevel, after that below are a few we recommend.
Backstory: Why I Thought About Changing from Keap
To understand what attracted me to GoHighLevel in the first place, you need context about my previous setup. For over 5 years I had been happily counting on Keap (previously Infusionsoft) to meet all my client administration and automation needs.
I located Keap instinctive to make use of and it handled everything I needed– CRM, e-mail marketing, sales funnels, membership websites, and client support.
Keap’s CRM and sales and marketing automation are created to aid local business maintain their customers while including brand-new ones effortlessly. Automate follow-ups with e-mails and texts, ensuring leads and clients obtain the ideal messages at the right time. Use web site and social media sites types to improve lead follow-up, and manage your development with easy appointment scheduling and lead tracking. Boost sales with automated quoting, invoicing, and payment processing, liberating your time. With Keap, local business can conserve 10 hours per week and rise revenue by 39%. Begin with a 14-day free trial, no bank card needed.
Why we like Keap
Keap provides a comprehensive client connection management (CRM) and marketing automation remedy customized for local business and entrepreneurs. We appreciate Keap’s concentrate on streamlining sales procedures and supporting consumer relationships through powerful automation tools. The system’s all-in-one method incorporates CRM, e-mail marketing, invoicing, and job monitoring, making it particularly appealing for businesses looking to settle their technology stack.
Generally, it just functioned accurately with marginal difficulty or upkeep called for. My open and click-through rates were fantastic (like 35% excellent). Automations ran smoothly without any problems.
So why in the world was I lured to uproot my whole operational structure from a system that worked to try something unverified and untested?
In knowledge I can confess I obtained attracted by the alarm phone call of “shiny object syndrome”. You understand the sensation: when every person’s talking about a new tool that will reinvent your organization … The lawn usually looks greener on the other side, and I questioned whether GoHighLevel could minimize friction factors that I ‘d learned to endure throughout the years with Keap.
I withstood in the beginning, yet a couple of more stress led me to believe maybe it was time for a change.
The Investment: Migrating My Firm to GoHighLevel
Earlier this year I made a decision to take the plunge. I enrolled in HighLevel’s Agency plan at $297/month, spending considerably greater than the $97/month starter price.
This wasn’t a choice I took lightly. I understood switching platforms was going to call for moving all my Keap information and basically restoring my entire tech infrastructure from scratch utilizing every one of the GoHighLevel integrations available.
Below’s an introduction of just some of the initiative needed:
- Manually exporting 20,000+ e-mail customer records
- Recreating loads of automations and workflows
- Relocating customer profiles, notes, and task data to the new CRM
- Reconfiguring my Stripe billing integration
- Setting up landing pages, coupons, and sales funnels throughout once more
- Learning a completely international UX and interface style
All in, I spent around 30-40 laborious hours of arrangement work transitioning everything over– as well as dealing with lost productivity throughout the switch.
But ultimately, it was a computed investment I was willing to make. I figured some temporary discomfort would settle with GoHighLevel offering a far better long-lasting solution for my organization, Dripify. Oh exactly how incorrect I was …
It only took me concerning a month of hands-on use to realize I had actually made a large mistake. The issues began accumulating swiftly, until it got to a factor I needed to reduce my losses and switch over back to Keap completely.
Allow’s go through the nightmarish problems I encountered.
Safety And Security Issues & Several Vermin
Given GoHighLevel placed itself as an all-in-one automation system, I took care to thoroughly recreate every single workflow from my old Keap account.
These included sequences for onboarding brand-new e-mail customers, onboarding new customers, automating follow-ups for webinar enrollments, sending occasion suggestions, managing membership expirations and much more.
Whatever appeared to be working fine … till suddenly it wasn’t. One early morning, I awoke to find 171 completely pointless emails had actually been sent to customers that should NOT have obtained them. This took place 3 days in a row, with a different set of 160 individuals every day.
I desperately tried fixing and restoring the automation from square one. But the problem lingered.
When I frantically reached out to their assistance team, they vaguely declared “web server problems” were to blame. Yet this explanation didn’t make any type of sense, since the errors continued happening each early morning like clockwork unassociated to any kind of downtime.
In my mind, this massive failing was totally undesirable and just really did not help my organization. I have hundreds of contacts depending on my automated campaigns running smoothly.
So if GoHighLevel was mosting likely to be totally unreliable, just how could I leave mission-critical workflows and delicate customer data to their innovation?
The unintuitive interface only compounded these issues …
Irritating UX
Originating from Keap where everything was seamless and instinctive, GoHighLevel’s learning contour really felt high and difficult.
Basic tasks like modifying workflows entailed excavating via menu systems that were all over the place. Key setups were unexplainably spread in totally various areas. Moving in between features really felt disjointed or complex.
I’ll inform you what I suggest by discussing their funnel builder as an example. There were 3 different settings panels to handle overall, specific, and product arrangements. Yet for some insane reason, the web links to access each of these core settings were spread out on contrary sides of the display. What!?
As a person that values clean, thoughtful layout, this seriously irritated me.
It strengthened that GoHighLevel still felt like a work-in-progress instead of a polished item all set for prime-time use. Their concerns appeared focused on packing in every feature under the sun, with inadequate use as a second thought.
And speaking of features, I quickly understood the small cost tag included costly compromises …
Deceptive Pricing GoHighLevel For Consultants
Among GoHighLevel’s biggest selling points is the budget-friendly cost for accessibility to numerous features. Yet I promptly learned this low-cost base expense was deceptive.
They nickle-and-dimed individuals with erratic fees for core capability. All of a sudden my charge card declarations had obscure $10 costs from GoHighLevel occasionally.
As it ended up, you obtain billed each time you send out an email through their servers. So for high volume individuals, this amounted to hundreds of dollars in unexpected costs.
In between these per-email costs and paying extra for deliverability add-ons like Mailgun, my “cost effective” GoHighLevel registration ended up costing substantially MORE than my Keap plan.
The reduced price tag was alluring, yet just not reasonable in practice. This bait-and-switch left a bad preference in my mouth.
Email Rates Suffered
The last dealbreaker was seeing my thoroughly supported email open rates plunge virtually overnight after switching to GoHighLevel.
Formerly, my target market involvement regularly struck 35-40% open prices in Keap month after month. Once I migrated their documents over to GoHighLevel, efficiency tanked instantly to a pathetic 9% open price.
Regardless of how much I enhanced my sending methods or tried every troubleshooting trick, I might barely push open rates back into the teenagers– still a 50%+ decline from my previous benchmarks GoHighLevel For Consultants.
Let me repeat: my exact same audience and emails all of a sudden had dreadful engagement. The only point I could assume that would certainly be causing this was whatever was occurring behind the scenes at GoHighLevel. For an agency so depending on e-mail marketing, this was a big deal.
Between the crippling deliverability concerns, concealed costs, busted features, and terrible user interface, I had lastly reached my restriction …
Why I Quit GoHighLevel after 37 Days
Simply 45 days after migrating my firm to GoHighLevel, I understood I had made a big blunder. The disadvantages significantly exceeded any type of benefits.
No software program is ideal, but the large quantity of problems was past acceptable.
At the end of the day, software boils down to trust fund. If I can not trust it to handle vital features effectively or believe a vendor has my best interests in mind, then it’s time to leave– also after investing significant time, cash, and initiative moving.
So I made the hard call to turn around training course and return back to Keap entirely just weeks after going done in on GoHighLevel. Allow’s explore what I picked up from this ordeal.
Secret Takeaways: What I Gained from My GoHighLevel Mistake
My time with HighLevel can be summarized as a pricey ill fortune. However in hindsight, it showed me a couple of key lessons:
- Stick to what works. Don’t disturb what’s working unless something is definitively far better across the board. Change brings danger.
- Veterinarian declares thoroughly. Marketing hype around new software application usually obscures bigger underlying defects. Deep due diligence is vital.
- Select simpleness over features. Properly designed tools ought to make your work life less complicated, not much more difficult and unpleasant.
- Transparency develops depend on. Opaque pricing, questionable reseller terms, and finger-pointing to escape issues destroys depend on.
- Look for unbiased evaluations. Pleased assistance evaluates mean much less if extreme concerns imply inadequate overall usability.
- Perfection is impossible. No solitary solution can completely satisfy every unique company need. Find the least-bad fit.
- Development over change. Step-by-step enhancements normally exceed dangerous wholesale reinvention of what already functions penalty.
In other words, I found out to be extra doubtful of “as well excellent to be real” marketing insurance claims and much less lured by the attraction of shiny brand-new items. The tools you use daily must gain count on via transparency and performance, not glossy advertising.