As a company proprietor for over a decade, I depend on software and automation to streamline operations and deliver results. So when GoHighLevel arised on the scene couple of years back, it most definitely captured my interest GoHighLevel For Life Insurance.
The concept was appealing– an all-in-one client administration system with marketing, sales, and solution tools integrated with each other. As an entrepreneur constantly seeking to simplify and scale my service, it felt like a dream become a reality theoretically. Who wouldn’t desire a solitary option that does it all?
However in this in-depth GoHighLevel testimonial, I’ll take you inside my tragic journey of trying (and failing) to switch to this prominent brand-new software application. You’ll find out:
If you’re thinking about whether GoHighLevel is right for your very own organization needs, with any luck you can gain from my painful errors and inflated assumptions.
Looter: I do NOT recommend GoHighLevel. If you require a CRM, begin with this list of best CRMs instead. I use Keap.
Some GoHighLevel Alternatives
If you’re seeking a sales, marketing, and job management choice to GoHighLevel, then here are a few we suggest.
Backstory: Why I Thought About Switching Over from Keap
To recognize what attracted me to GoHighLevel in the first place, you require context concerning my previous arrangement. For over 5 years I had actually been gladly counting on Keap (formerly Infusionsoft) to satisfy all my customer monitoring and automation requirements.
I located Keap intuitive to use and it managed every little thing I required– CRM, e-mail marketing, sales funnels, membership websites, and customer assistance.
Keap’s CRM and sales and marketing automation are designed to aid small businesses maintain their clients while including brand-new ones easily. Automate follow-ups with e-mails and messages, ensuring leads and clients obtain the ideal messages at the right time. Use site and social media kinds to improve lead follow-up, and manage your growth with simple visit scheduling and lead monitoring. Boost sales with automated quoting, invoicing, and settlement handling, maximizing your time. With Keap, local business can conserve 10 hours weekly and boost profits by 39%. Begin with a 14-day free trial, no charge card called for.
Why we like Keap
Keap supplies a thorough customer relationship administration (CRM) and marketing automation remedy customized for small companies and business owners. We appreciate Keap’s focus on enhancing sales processes and nurturing consumer partnerships through powerful automation devices. The system’s all-in-one strategy integrates CRM, e-mail marketing, invoicing, and task management, making it especially attractive for companies looking to combine their tech pile.
Essentially, it simply worked dependably with marginal hassle or maintenance needed. My open and click-through rates were fantastic (like 35% great). Automations ran efficiently without any problems.
So why in the world was I tempted to uproot my whole functional foundation from a system that worked to attempt something unverified and untried?
In hindsight I can admit I obtained seduced by the siren phone call of “shiny item syndrome”. You understand the sensation: when everyone’s speaking about a brand-new device that will transform your organization … The yard usually looks greener beyond, and I questioned whether GoHighLevel might minimize friction points that I ‘d found out to endure over the years with Keap.
I resisted in the beginning, however a few more disappointments led me to believe perhaps it was time for a change.
The Financial investment: Moving My Agency to GoHighLevel
Previously this year I made a decision to start. I signed up for HighLevel’s Agency plan at $297/month, spending dramatically greater than the $97/month starter cost.
This had not been a decision I ignored. I understood switching systems was mosting likely to require migrating all my Keap information and essentially restoring my entire tech facilities from square one using all of the GoHighLevel integrations readily available.
Right here’s an overview of just a few of the effort called for:
- Manually exporting 20,000+ email customer records
- Recreating loads of automations and workflows
- Relocating client profiles, notes, and job data to the brand-new CRM
- Reconfiguring my Stripe billing integration
- Establishing landing pages, promos, and sales funnels throughout again
- Learning a completely foreign UX and user interface style
All in, I invested around 30-40 tedious hours of configuration work transitioning every little thing over– in addition to handling shed productivity throughout the switch.
But eventually, it was a calculated investment I was willing to make. I figured some short-term pain would certainly settle with GoHighLevel providing a far better long-lasting remedy for my company, Dripify. Oh exactly how wrong I was …
It only took me regarding a month of hands-on use to recognize I had made a big mistake. The concerns started accumulating rapidly, up until it got to a point I had to cut my losses and switch over back to Keap completely.
Allow’s go through the horrible issues I ran into.
Safety Issues & Several Bugs
Given GoHighLevel positioned itself as an all-in-one automation platform, I made sure to meticulously recreate every workflow from my old Keap account.
These consisted of series for onboarding brand-new email clients, onboarding brand-new customers, automating follow-ups for webinar registrations, sending event tips, handling membership expirations and far more.
Every little thing seemed to be operating fine … until all of a sudden it wasn’t. One early morning, I woke up to find 171 entirely pointless e-mails had been sent to customers who must NOT have actually received them. This happened three days in a row, with a various set of 160 people every day.
I anxiously attempted troubleshooting and restoring the automation from the ground up. However the problem continued.
When I seriously connected to their support team, they vaguely asserted “web server issues” were at fault. Yet this description really did not make any kind of sense, considering that the errors proceeded occurring each early morning like clockwork unconnected to any kind of downtime.
In my mind, this massive failure was completely inappropriate and simply really did not help my organization. I have countless calls relying on my automated campaigns running smoothly.
So if GoHighLevel was mosting likely to be completely unstable, exactly how could I turn over mission-critical workflows and sensitive customer data to their technology?
The unintuitive user interface only worsened these concerns …
Frustrating UX
Coming from Keap where every little thing was smooth and user-friendly, GoHighLevel’s learning contour really felt steep and complex.
Simple jobs like editing and enhancing workflows entailed excavating with menu systems that were all over the place. Secret setups were unexplainably spread in totally various areas. Relocating in between functions really felt disjointed or confusing.
I’ll tell you what I suggest by talking about their funnel builder as an example. There were 3 separate setups panels to manage general, private, and product setups. Yet for some crazy reason, the links to accessibility each of these core setups were expanded on contrary sides of the display. What!?
As a person that values clean, thoughtful design, this seriously upset me.
It strengthened that GoHighLevel still seemed like a work-in-progress instead of a polished product prepared for prime-time use. Their priorities appeared concentrated on stuffing in every feature imaginable, with bad functionality as a second thought.
And speaking of features, I quickly understood the low cost tag featured pricey compromises …
Misleading Pricing GoHighLevel For Life Insurance
Among GoHighLevel’s most significant marketing factors is the economical cost for accessibility to numerous features. But I promptly learned this low-cost base cost was misleading.
They nickle-and-dimed customers with occasional costs for core performance. All of a sudden my credit card declarations had obscure $10 charges from GoHighLevel occasionally.
As it turned out, you obtain billed every time you send an e-mail with their servers. So for high quantity customers, this added up to hundreds of dollars in unforeseen expenses.
In between these per-email costs and paying additional for deliverability add-ons like Mailgun, my “cost effective” GoHighLevel subscription ended up setting you back significantly greater than my Keap plan.
The reduced sticker price was appealing, but just not reasonable in practice. This bait-and-switch left a poor preference in my mouth.
Email Fees Suffered
The final dealbreaker was seeing my thoroughly supported email open rates drop virtually overnight after switching over to GoHighLevel.
Formerly, my audience interaction continually struck 35-40% open prices in Keap month after month. But once I migrated their records over to GoHighLevel, performance tanked quickly to a pathetic 9% open rate.
No matter how much I maximized my sending out methods or attempted every troubleshooting method, I could hardly push open rates back right into the teens– still a 50%+ decrease from my previous benchmarks GoHighLevel For Life Insurance.
Let me repeat: my exact same target market and e-mails unexpectedly had horrible engagement. The only point I can believe that would certainly be creating this was whatever was happening behind the scenes at GoHighLevel. For an agency so dependent on e-mail marketing, this was a big deal.
Between the crippling deliverability concerns, concealed costs, busted features, and terrible user interface, I had actually lastly reached my limit …
Why I Stop GoHighLevel after 37 Days
Simply 45 days after migrating my agency to GoHighLevel, I recognized I had actually made a significant error. The cons significantly outweighed any type of benefits.
No software application is best, yet the sheer quantity of problems was beyond acceptable.
At the end of the day, software application boils down to trust fund. If I can not trust it to take care of vital features capably or think a supplier has my benefits in mind, then it’s time to walk away– even after spending substantial time, money, and effort migrating.
So I made the tough phone call to turn around training course and return back to Keap completely simply weeks after going all in on GoHighLevel. Let’s explore what I gained from this ordeal.
Secret Takeaways: What I Learned From My GoHighLevel Blunder
My time with HighLevel can be summarized as a costly misadventure. However in hindsight, it educated me a couple of crucial lessons:
- Adhere to what jobs. Don’t distress what’s working unless something is definitively much better across the board. Adjustment brings danger.
- Veterinarian asserts completely. Marketing buzz around brand-new software program frequently obscures larger underlying flaws. Deep due persistance is important.
- Select simpleness over features. Properly designed tools ought to make your work life much easier, not more challenging and unpleasant.
- Openness constructs depend on. Opaque pricing, shady reseller terms, and finger-pointing to escape troubles destroys trust.
- Look for impartial testimonials. Satisfied assistance examines suggest less if too much problems imply poor total functionality.
- Excellence is impossible. No solitary solution can perfectly meet every distinct business requirement. Find the least-bad fit.
- Evolution over revolution. Step-by-step improvements commonly exceed dangerous wholesale reinvention of what currently works fine.
In short, I learned to be more doubtful of “as well excellent to be real” marketing cases and much less lured by the appeal of glossy new objects. The devices you use daily must make trust fund with transparency and efficiency, not slick advertising.