As a firm owner for over a decade, I rely upon software and automation to streamline operations and provide results. So when GoHighLevel emerged on the scene couple of years back, it absolutely caught my attention GoHighLevel For Mortgage Brokers.
The idea was appealing– an all-in-one customer management platform with marketing, sales, and solution tools incorporated with each other. As a business owner always looking to simplify and scale my business, it looked like a dream come to life theoretically. Who would not want a solitary remedy that does it all?
But in this thorough GoHighLevel evaluation, I’ll take you inside my dreadful journey of trying (and failing) to switch over to this preferred brand-new software application. You’ll find out:
If you’re taking into consideration whether GoHighLevel is right for your very own service requirements, hopefully you can pick up from my painful blunders and pumped up assumptions.
Looter: I do NOT suggest GoHighLevel. If you need a CRM, begin with this checklist of finest CRMs rather. I use Keap.
Some GoHighLevel Alternatives
If you’re looking for a sales, marketing, and project monitoring alternative to GoHighLevel, then right here are a few we recommend.
Backstory: Why I Considered Changing from Keap
To understand what attracted me to GoHighLevel to begin with, you require context about my previous setup. For over 5 years I had been happily relying upon Keap (previously Infusionsoft) to fulfill all my client monitoring and automation demands.
I located Keap user-friendly to make use of and it managed whatever I required– CRM, e-mail marketing, sales funnels, membership websites, and customer support.
Keap’s CRM and sales and marketing automation are made to aid local business keep their customers while adding new ones effortlessly. Automate follow-ups with e-mails and texts, making certain leads and clients obtain the ideal messages at the correct time. Usage internet site and social networks forms to enhance lead follow-up, and handle your development with simple visit organizing and lead tracking. Boost sales with automated estimating, invoicing, and repayment processing, liberating your time. With Keap, small companies can save 10 hours per week and increase earnings by 39%. Start with a 14-day free trial, no credit card needed.
Why we like Keap
Keap provides a detailed client relationship administration (CRM) and marketing automation remedy customized for local business and business owners. We value Keap’s focus on improving sales procedures and supporting customer connections via powerful automation tools. The system’s all-in-one approach integrates CRM, e-mail marketing, invoicing, and job monitoring, making it specifically appealing for businesses looking to combine their tech stack.
Generally, it simply functioned reliably with minimal fuss or maintenance required. My open and click-through prices were fantastic (like 35% fantastic). Automations ran efficiently with no issues.
So why on earth was I attracted to uproot my whole operational structure from a system that worked to attempt something unproven and untested?
In knowledge I can admit I got seduced by the siren telephone call of “glossy things disorder”. You recognize the sensation: when everyone’s talking about a new tool that will transform your business … The turf often looks greener beyond, and I asked yourself whether GoHighLevel might reduce friction factors that I would certainly discovered to endure for many years with Keap.
I resisted at first, however a couple of more disappointments led me to think perhaps it was time for an adjustment.
The Investment: Moving My Agency to GoHighLevel
Previously this year I decided to start. I enrolled in HighLevel’s Company plan at $297/month, investing substantially greater than the $97/month starter expense.
This had not been a decision I took lightly. I knew switching over platforms was mosting likely to call for migrating all my Keap information and basically restoring my whole technology facilities from the ground up using every one of the GoHighLevel integrations offered.
Below’s a summary of just a few of the initiative needed:
- By hand exporting 20,000+ email customer documents
- Recreating loads of automations and workflows
- Moving customer profiles, notes, and job information to the brand-new CRM
- Reconfiguring my Stripe billing integration
- Setting up landing pages, coupons, and sales funnels around again
- Learning a completely foreign UX and user interface design
Done in, I spent around 30-40 tedious hours of configuration work transitioning everything over– not to mention dealing with lost productivity during the button.
But eventually, it was a computed investment I wanted to make. I figured some short-term pain would certainly settle with GoHighLevel offering a far better long-lasting remedy for my company, Dripify. Oh exactly how incorrect I was …
It just took me regarding a month of hands-on usage to recognize I had actually made a big mistake. The concerns began piling up swiftly, till it reached a factor I had to reduce my losses and switch back to Keap totally.
Allow’s walk through the nightmarish issues I encountered.
Protection Issues & Several Vermin
Offered GoHighLevel positioned itself as an all-in-one automation platform, I made sure to carefully recreate every single workflow from my old Keap account.
These consisted of series for onboarding new e-mail subscribers, onboarding brand-new clients, automating follow-ups for webinar enrollments, sending out event reminders, handling membership expiries and much more.
Whatever seemed to be working penalty … up until instantly it wasn’t. One morning, I woke up to locate 171 completely irrelevant e-mails had actually been sent to individuals that ought to NOT have gotten them. This occurred 3 days straight, with a various set of 160 individuals every day.
I hysterically tried fixing and reconstructing the automation from the ground up. However the problem continued.
When I desperately connected to their assistance team, they slightly claimed “web server problems” were at fault. But this explanation didn’t make any kind of sense, considering that the errors continued happening each early morning like clockwork unconnected to any type of downtime.
In my mind, this enormous failing was completely unacceptable and simply didn’t work for my company. I have countless contacts counting on my automated campaigns running smoothly.
So if GoHighLevel was mosting likely to be absolutely undependable, exactly how could I delegate mission-critical workflows and sensitive customer information to their innovation?
The unintuitive user interface only intensified these concerns …
Frustrating UX
Coming from Keap where every little thing was seamless and user-friendly, GoHighLevel’s learning curve really felt high and complex.
Basic tasks like modifying workflows involved digging with menu systems that were all over the place. Key setups were unexplainably spread in absolutely different sections. Relocating in between functions really felt disjointed or complicated.
I’ll inform you what I indicate by discussing their funnel builder as an example. There were 3 different setups panels to take care of general, private, and product configurations. Yet for some crazy reason, the links to gain access to each of these core setups were spread out on contrary sides of the display. What!?
As somebody who values clean, thoughtful style, this seriously upset me.
It enhanced that GoHighLevel still felt like a work-in-progress rather than a polished item ready for prime-time usage. Their concerns appeared concentrated on packing in every feature imaginable, with bad use as a second thought.
And speaking of features, I soon recognized the small cost tag featured pricey concessions …
Misleading Pricing GoHighLevel For Mortgage Brokers
Among GoHighLevel’s largest selling factors is the budget-friendly price for access to a lot of features. Yet I swiftly learned this low-cost base cost was misleading.
They nickle-and-dimed individuals with occasional fees for core functionality. Unexpectedly my credit card statements had obscure $10 costs from GoHighLevel occasionally.
As it ended up, you obtain billed every time you send out an email through their web servers. So for high quantity individuals, this amounted to thousands of bucks in unforeseen costs.
In between these per-email fees and paying additional for deliverability add-ons like Mailgun, my “inexpensive” GoHighLevel registration ended up costing dramatically MORE than my Keap plan.
The reduced price tag was tempting, yet just not practical in practice. This bait-and-switch left a poor preference in my mouth.
Email Rates Suffered
The last dealbreaker was seeing my carefully supported email open rates plunge almost overnight after switching to GoHighLevel.
Previously, my target market engagement consistently hit 35-40% open prices in Keap month after month. Once I moved their records over to GoHighLevel, efficiency tanked immediately to a worthless 9% open price.
Regardless of how much I maximized my sending out practices or attempted every repairing method, I can hardly nudge open prices back into the teenagers– still a 50%+ decrease from my previous benchmarks GoHighLevel For Mortgage Brokers.
Let me repeat: my exact same target market and emails instantly had dreadful interaction. The only thing I can believe that would be triggering this was whatever was taking place behind the scenes at GoHighLevel. For an agency so dependent on email marketing, this was a big deal.
Between the crippling deliverability problems, concealed charges, busted features, and awful user interface, I had finally reached my restriction …
Why I Stop GoHighLevel after 37 Days
Simply 45 days after migrating my company to GoHighLevel, I knew I had made a big mistake. The cons significantly exceeded any benefits.
No software application is perfect, however the large volume of issues was past acceptable.
At the end of the day, software boils down to trust. If I can not trust it to manage vital functions competently or believe a vendor has my best interests in mind, after that it’s time to walk away– even after investing significant time, money, and initiative migrating.
So I made the hard call to turn around training course and return back to Keap completely 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 pricey ill fortune. But in knowledge, it educated me a couple of essential lessons:
- Adhere to what works. Do not upset what’s working unless something is definitively far better across the board. Change brings risk.
- Vet claims completely. Marketing hype around new software application commonly covers bigger underlying defects. Deep due persistance is essential.
- Select simpleness over features. Properly designed devices must make your job life less complicated, not more difficult and unpleasant.
- Openness constructs count on. Opaque pricing, questionable reseller terms, and finger-pointing to evade issues ruins count on.
- Look for impartial testimonials. Pleased assistance evaluates imply much less if too much problems imply inadequate total usability.
- Excellence is impossible. No solitary solution can completely meet every distinct company need. Locate the least-bad fit.
- Development over change. Step-by-step enhancements commonly outweigh high-risk wholesale reinvention of what currently works fine.
In short, I discovered to be a lot more cynical of “also excellent to be real” marketing insurance claims and less attracted by the allure of glossy new objects. The tools you use daily ought to make count on with transparency and efficiency, not slick advertising.