As a company proprietor for over a years, I rely upon software application and automation to improve procedures and supply outcomes. So when GoHighLevel emerged on the scene few years back, it certainly caught my focus GoHighLevel For Financial Advisors.
The concept was appealing– an all-in-one client management system with marketing, sales, and service tools incorporated with each other. As an entrepreneur constantly aiming to streamline and scale my organization, it felt like a desire become a reality theoretically. That wouldn’t desire a single solution that does it all?
Yet in this thorough GoHighLevel testimonial, I’ll take you inside my disastrous journey of attempting (and stopping working) to switch over to this preferred new software. You’ll discover:
If you’re considering whether GoHighLevel is right for your very own company needs, ideally you can pick up from my excruciating errors and blew up expectations.
Spoiler: I do NOT recommend GoHighLevel. If you need a CRM, begin with this listing of finest CRMs instead. I utilize Keap.
Some GoHighLevel Alternatives
If you’re trying to find a sales, marketing, and project administration alternative to GoHighLevel, then right here are a couple of we advise.
Backstory: Why I Took Into Consideration Switching from Keap
To comprehend what attracted me to GoHighLevel to begin with, you need context about my previous arrangement. For over 5 years I had actually been happily relying upon Keap (previously Infusionsoft) to satisfy all my client monitoring and automation needs.
I discovered Keap user-friendly to use and it managed every little thing I needed– CRM, e-mail marketing, sales funnels, subscription sites, and client support.
Keap’s CRM and sales and marketing automation are made to help small companies keep their clients while adding new ones effortlessly. Automate follow-ups with emails and texts, making sure leads and clients obtain the appropriate messages at the right time. Use website and social networks forms to improve lead follow-up, and handle your development with simple visit organizing and lead tracking. Boost sales with automated estimating, invoicing, and repayment handling, liberating your time. With Keap, small companies can save 10 hours weekly and boost income by 39%. Begin with a 14-day free trial, no credit card called for.
Why we like Keap
Keap supplies a detailed consumer partnership administration (CRM) and marketing automation option customized for small businesses and business owners. We appreciate Keap’s concentrate on enhancing sales processes and nurturing customer partnerships via effective automation devices. The platform’s all-in-one method combines CRM, email marketing, invoicing, and task monitoring, making it especially attractive for services seeking to combine their technology pile.
For the most part, it just functioned accurately with marginal hassle or upkeep called for. My open and click-through rates were terrific (like 35% wonderful). Automations ran efficiently without any issues.
So why on earth was I attracted to uproot my whole functional structure from a system that worked to attempt something unproven and untried?
In hindsight I can confess I obtained seduced by the siren phone call of “shiny item syndrome”. You know the sensation: when every person’s talking about a brand-new device that will revolutionize your service … The lawn often looks greener beyond, and I asked yourself whether GoHighLevel might lower rubbing factors that I ‘d discovered to tolerate over the years with Keap.
I stood up to in the beginning, but a few even more stress led me to assume possibly it was time for an adjustment.
The Investment: Migrating My Company to GoHighLevel
Previously this year I determined to take the plunge. I registered for HighLevel’s Company plan at $297/month, spending considerably more than the $97/month starter price.
This had not been a decision I took lightly. I understood switching systems was going to need moving all my Keap information and essentially rebuilding my whole tech framework from the ground up making use of every one of the GoHighLevel integrations offered.
Right here’s an introduction of simply a few of the effort required:
- By hand exporting 20,000+ email client records
- Recreating loads of automations and workflows
- Moving customer profiles, notes, and project data to the brand-new CRM
- Reconfiguring my Stripe payment integration
- Establishing landing pages, coupons, and sales funnels throughout once again
- Learning a totally foreign UX and interface layout
All in, I spent around 30-40 laborious hours of arrangement job transitioning every little thing over– and also taking care of shed performance during the switch.
But inevitably, it was a computed investment I was willing to make. I figured some short-term discomfort would certainly repay with GoHighLevel providing a better long-lasting remedy for my organization, Dripify. Oh how incorrect I was …
It only took me about a month of hands-on usage to understand I had made a big error. The issues started piling up promptly, up until it reached a point I needed to reduce my losses and switch over back to Keap totally.
Allow’s walk through the horrible troubles I encountered.
Safety Issues & Lots of Bugs
Provided GoHighLevel positioned itself as an all-in-one automation platform, I made sure to diligently recreate each and every single workflow from my old Keap account.
These included series for onboarding new email subscribers, onboarding brand-new customers, automating follow-ups for webinar enrollments, sending event reminders, managing membership expirations and a lot more.
Every little thing seemed to be working fine … until suddenly it wasn’t. One early morning, I woke up to find 171 completely unnecessary emails had actually been sent out to users who ought to NOT have actually obtained them. This took place three days straight, with a different batch of 160 individuals daily.
I hysterically tried troubleshooting and reconstructing the automation from scratch. But the trouble persisted.
When I seriously connected to their support team, they slightly claimed “web server concerns” were to blame. Yet this description really did not make any kind of feeling, considering that the mistakes proceeded occurring each morning like clockwork unrelated to any type of downtime.
In my mind, this massive failure was completely unacceptable and just really did not work for my service. I have thousands of calls relying upon my automated campaigns running smoothly.
So if GoHighLevel was mosting likely to be entirely unstable, how could I turn over mission-critical workflows and sensitive client information to their modern technology?
The unintuitive user interface only worsened these issues …
Aggravating UX
Originating from Keap where everything was seamless and instinctive, GoHighLevel’s learning contour felt high and complicated.
Straightforward jobs like editing and enhancing workflows entailed digging through menu systems that were all over the place. Trick setups were unexplainably spread in totally various sections. Moving in between features felt disjointed or confusing.
I’ll inform you what I imply by speaking about their funnel builder as an instance. There were 3 different settings panels to manage general, private, and item arrangements. Yet for some crazy reason, the links to accessibility each of these core settings were spread out on contrary sides of the display. What!?
As somebody who values tidy, thoughtful style, this seriously irritated me.
It enhanced that GoHighLevel still felt like a work-in-progress instead of a refined item prepared for prime-time use. Their priorities appeared concentrated on packing in every feature under the sun, with poor use as a second thought.
And talking features, I quickly realized the small cost tag featured costly concessions …
Deceptive Pricing GoHighLevel For Financial Advisors
One of GoHighLevel’s most significant marketing factors is the inexpensive cost for accessibility to a lot of features. However I quickly discovered this low-cost base expense was deceptive.
They nickle-and-dimed customers with sporadic fees for core functionality. Unexpectedly my bank card statements had obscure $10 costs from GoHighLevel occasionally.
As it turned out, you obtain billed every single time you send out an e-mail with their servers. So for high quantity individuals, this added up to hundreds of dollars in unexpected expenses.
In between these per-email costs and paying additional for deliverability add-ons like Mailgun, my “budget friendly” GoHighLevel subscription ended up setting you back substantially MORE than my Keap plan.
The reduced sticker price was appealing, yet simply not reasonable in practice. This bait-and-switch left a negative taste in my mouth.
Email Fees Suffered
The final dealbreaker was seeing my carefully nurtured e-mail open prices drop practically over night after switching over to GoHighLevel.
Previously, my target market involvement consistently hit 35-40% open rates in Keap month after month. Once I migrated their records over to GoHighLevel, efficiency tanked immediately to a pitiful 9% open rate.
Regardless of how much I maximized my sending out practices or tried every fixing trick, I could barely push open prices back right into the teenagers– still a 50%+ decline from my previous benchmarks GoHighLevel For Financial Advisors.
Let me repeat: my exact same target market and emails all of a sudden had awful interaction. The only point I might think that would be triggering this was whatever was happening behind the scenes at GoHighLevel. For a firm so based on e-mail marketing, this was a big deal.
Between the crippling deliverability concerns, hidden costs, damaged features, and awful interface, I had ultimately reached my limitation …
Why I Give up GoHighLevel after 37 Days
Simply 45 days after moving my firm to GoHighLevel, I understood I had actually made a big error. The cons drastically outweighed any type of benefits.
No software program is excellent, however the large quantity of problems was past acceptable.
At the end of the day, software boils down to trust fund. If I can’t trust it to manage essential features properly or think a vendor has my benefits in mind, then it’s time to walk away– even after investing substantial time, cash, and effort migrating.
So I made the tough phone call to turn around training course and return back to Keap totally simply weeks after going all in on GoHighLevel. Allow’s explore what I picked up from this debacle.
Key Takeaways: What I Gained from My GoHighLevel Blunder
My time with HighLevel can be summed up as an expensive misadventure. Yet in hindsight, it taught me a few crucial lessons:
- Stay with what jobs. Do not disturb what’s functioning unless something is definitively far better across the board. Modification brings danger.
- Vet claims completely. Marketing buzz around new software frequently covers bigger underlying problems. Deep due diligence is necessary.
- Pick simplicity over features. Well-designed devices need to make your work life much easier, not more challenging and untidy.
- Openness constructs count on. Opaque pricing, dubious reseller terms, and finger-pointing to escape problems damages count on.
- Look for impartial reviews. Delighted support reviews mean much less if excessive problems imply bad overall use.
- Perfection is difficult. No single option can completely meet every special service demand. Discover the least-bad fit.
- Advancement over revolution. Incremental improvements commonly outweigh risky wholesale reinvention of what currently works penalty.
In other words, I discovered to be more unconvinced of “also excellent to be real” marketing cases and less attracted by the attraction of glossy brand-new objects. The devices you use daily should make count on via openness and performance, not glossy advertising.