As an agency proprietor for over a years, I depend on software application and automation to enhance procedures and supply results. So when GoHighLevel arised on the scene couple of years back, it certainly caught my focus GoHighLevel For Legal Firms.
The concept was attractive– an all-in-one customer management platform with marketing, sales, and service tools integrated together. As an entrepreneur always aiming to simplify and scale my service, it felt like a dream happened theoretically. Who would not desire a single option that does it all?
Yet in this thorough GoHighLevel review, I’ll take you inside my devastating journey of trying (and stopping working) to change to this preferred new software. You’ll find out:
If you’re thinking about whether GoHighLevel is right for your very own organization needs, ideally you can pick up from my unpleasant errors and pumped up expectations.
Looter: I do NOT suggest GoHighLevel. If you need a CRM, start with this list of best CRMs rather. I make use of Keap.
Some GoHighLevel Alternatives
If you’re seeking a sales, marketing, and project monitoring option to GoHighLevel, then here are a couple of we advise.
Backstory: Why I Considered Switching Over from Keap
To understand what attracted me to GoHighLevel to begin with, you require context regarding my previous arrangement. For over 5 years I had been gladly depending on Keap (formerly Infusionsoft) to satisfy all my client management and automation needs.
I found Keap user-friendly to utilize and it dealt with every little thing I required– CRM, email marketing, sales funnels, membership websites, and customer assistance.
Keap’s CRM and sales and marketing automation are designed to assist local business keep their clients while including new ones easily. Automate follow-ups with emails and messages, making sure leads and clients get the ideal messages at the correct time. Usage site and social media sites kinds to enhance lead follow-up, and manage your development with easy consultation scheduling and lead tracking. Boost sales with automated quoting, invoicing, and repayment processing, liberating your time. With Keap, local business can conserve 10 hours per week and increase profits by 39%. Beginning with a 14-day free trial, no credit card needed.
Why we like Keap
Keap uses a thorough customer connection monitoring (CRM) and marketing automation service customized for local business and entrepreneurs. We appreciate Keap’s focus on streamlining sales processes and nurturing consumer relationships with powerful automation tools. The platform’s all-in-one strategy combines CRM, email marketing, invoicing, and task administration, making it especially eye-catching for organizations looking to consolidate their tech pile.
Generally, it simply worked accurately with marginal difficulty or upkeep called for. My open and click-through prices were great (like 35% great). Automations ran smoothly without concerns.
So why in the world was I tempted to uproot my whole operational foundation from a system that functioned to attempt something unverified and untested?
In hindsight I can admit I obtained seduced by the siren phone call of “glossy item syndrome”. You recognize the feeling: when every person’s speaking about a brand-new device that will certainly revolutionize your business … The yard frequently looks greener beyond, and I questioned whether GoHighLevel may reduce friction factors that I would certainly found out to endure over the years with Keap.
I stood up to in the beginning, but a few even more frustrations led me to believe maybe it was time for a modification.
The Investment: Migrating My Firm to GoHighLevel
Earlier this year I determined to take the plunge. I signed up for HighLevel’s Agency plan at $297/month, investing dramatically more than the $97/month starter price.
This had not been a choice I ignored. I recognized switching systems was going to call for moving all my Keap information and essentially reconstructing my entire tech infrastructure from square one making use of all of the GoHighLevel integrations offered.
Below’s an overview of just some of the initiative called for:
- Manually exporting 20,000+ e-mail customer documents
- Recreating lots of automations and workflows
- Relocating client profiles, notes, and task data to the brand-new CRM
- Reconfiguring my Stripe invoicing integration
- Setting up landing pages, coupons, and sales funnels all over again
- Learning a totally foreign UX and interface design
Done in, I invested around 30-40 laborious hours of arrangement work transitioning every little thing over– as well as handling shed performance throughout the switch.
However eventually, it was a calculated financial investment I was willing to make. I figured some short-term discomfort would pay off with GoHighLevel providing a better lasting solution for my company, Dripify. Oh how wrong I was …
It just took me regarding a month of hands-on use to realize I had made a big error. The concerns began piling up quickly, up until it got to a point I needed to reduce my losses and change back to Keap entirely.
Allow’s go through the horrible issues I encountered.
Safety And Security Issues & Several Bugs
Given GoHighLevel positioned itself as an all-in-one automation system, I made sure to meticulously recreate every single workflow from my old Keap account.
These included series for onboarding brand-new e-mail clients, onboarding new customers, automating follow-ups for webinar registrations, sending out occasion reminders, handling membership expirations and far more.
Every little thing seemed to be operating penalty … until instantly it wasn’t. One early morning, I awoke to discover 171 entirely unimportant emails had been sent out to customers that ought to NOT have obtained them. This occurred 3 days in a row, with a different set of 160 people every day.
I frantically tried fixing and restoring the automation from the ground up. Yet the issue persisted.
When I desperately connected to their assistance team, they slightly claimed “server issues” were to blame. But this description didn’t make any feeling, because the errors proceeded taking place each early morning like clockwork unrelated to any kind of downtime.
In my mind, this huge failing was totally unacceptable and simply didn’t help my business. I have hundreds of calls relying upon my automated campaigns running efficiently.
So if GoHighLevel was going to be totally undependable, just how could I entrust mission-critical workflows and delicate customer data to their technology?
The unintuitive interface just compounded these problems …
Discouraging UX
Coming from Keap where whatever was seamless and instinctive, GoHighLevel’s learning contour really felt high and complex.
Straightforward tasks like editing and enhancing workflows entailed digging through menu systems that were all over the place. Secret setups were unexplainably scattered in absolutely different areas. Moving in between functions really felt disjointed or confusing.
I’ll inform you what I mean by talking about their funnel builder as an example. There were 3 different settings panels to take care of total, private, and product arrangements. Yet for some crazy reason, the web links to gain access to each of these core setups were expanded on opposite sides of the screen. What!?
As somebody that values tidy, thoughtful design, this seriously irritated me.
It enhanced that GoHighLevel still seemed like a work-in-progress as opposed to a refined product prepared for prime-time usage. Their concerns seemed focused on stuffing in every feature under the sun, with inadequate functionality as an afterthought.
And talking features, I quickly understood the low price tag featured pricey concessions …
Misleading Pricing GoHighLevel For Legal Firms
Among GoHighLevel’s greatest selling factors is the inexpensive rate for accessibility to so many features. However I swiftly discovered this cheap base expense was misleading.
They nickle-and-dimed individuals with occasional costs for core performance. All of a sudden my bank card declarations had unclear $10 costs from GoHighLevel here and there.
As it turned out, you obtain charged every single time you send an e-mail through their web servers. So for high volume individuals, this amounted to thousands of bucks in unanticipated prices.
Between these per-email costs and paying extra for deliverability add-ons like Mailgun, my “budget friendly” GoHighLevel registration wound up setting you back substantially greater than my Keap plan.
The reduced price tag was appealing, however simply not realistic in practice. This bait-and-switch left a negative taste in my mouth.
Email Fees Suffered
The last dealbreaker was seeing my thoroughly supported e-mail open prices plummet almost over night after changing to GoHighLevel.
Formerly, my target market interaction constantly hit 35-40% open rates in Keap month after month. But once I moved their documents over to GoHighLevel, efficiency tanked instantaneously to a pathetic 9% open rate.
No matter how much I enhanced my sending out practices or tried every repairing technique, I could barely push open prices back into the teenagers– still a 50%+ decrease from my previous standards GoHighLevel For Legal Firms.
Let me repeat: my exact same audience and emails instantly had dreadful involvement. The only point I can think that would be creating this was whatever was happening behind the scenes at GoHighLevel. For a company so dependent on e-mail marketing, this was a big deal.
Between the crippling deliverability concerns, concealed costs, broken features, and terrible user interface, I had actually finally reached my limitation …
Why I Give up GoHighLevel after 37 Days
Simply 45 days after migrating my agency to GoHighLevel, I knew I had actually made a massive error. The cons significantly exceeded any kind of benefits.
No software program is excellent, yet the sheer quantity of issues was beyond appropriate.
At the end of the day, software comes down to trust. If I can not trust it to manage crucial functions effectively or believe a vendor has my best interests in mind, after that it’s time to leave– even after spending considerable time, money, and effort migrating.
So I made the hard call to reverse course and return back to Keap entirely just weeks after going all in on GoHighLevel. Let’s explore what I picked up from this fiasco.
Trick Takeaways: What I Gained from My GoHighLevel Blunder
My time with HighLevel can be summarized as a costly accident. However in knowledge, it instructed me a few vital lessons:
- Adhere to what works. Do not upset what’s functioning unless something is definitively far better across the board. Change brings risk.
- Vet claims completely. Marketing hype around new software program often obscures bigger underlying imperfections. Deep due diligence is vital.
- Choose simplicity over features. Properly designed tools should make your job life simpler, not more complicated and unpleasant.
- Transparency constructs trust fund. Opaque pricing, shady reseller terms, and finger-pointing to avert issues ruins count on.
- Look for unbiased evaluations. Pleased assistance evaluates imply less if excessive concerns indicate inadequate total usability.
- Excellence is difficult. No single remedy can completely fulfill every unique organization demand. Find the least-bad fit.
- Evolution over revolution. Step-by-step enhancements commonly surpass high-risk wholesale reinvention of what already works penalty.
Basically, I found out to be much more skeptical of “also great to be true” marketing insurance claims and much less tempted by the allure of shiny new things. The tools you utilize daily ought to make trust fund through transparency and efficiency, not glossy advertising.