As an agency owner for over a decade, I depend on software and automation to streamline operations and deliver results. So when GoHighLevel emerged on the scene few years back, it certainly captured my attention GoHighLevel For Sales Teams.
The idea was enticing– an all-in-one customer monitoring platform with marketing, sales, and service tools integrated with each other. As a business owner always wanting to streamline and scale my business, it appeared like a desire happened on paper. That would not desire a single option that does it all?
But in this in-depth GoHighLevel evaluation, I’ll take you inside my dreadful journey of attempting (and stopping working) to change to this popular brand-new software. You’ll discover:
If you’re thinking about whether GoHighLevel is right for your own service needs, with any luck you can pick up from my unpleasant mistakes and blew up assumptions.
Spoiler: I do NOT recommend GoHighLevel. If you need a CRM, start with this list of ideal CRMs rather. I use Keap.
Some GoHighLevel Alternatives
If you’re looking for a sales, marketing, and job administration alternative to GoHighLevel, after that here are a couple of we suggest.
Backstory: Why I Considered Changing from Keap
To understand what attracted me to GoHighLevel to begin with, you need context regarding my previous configuration. For over 5 years I had been gladly relying on Keap (previously Infusionsoft) to fulfill all my client monitoring and automation requirements.
I discovered Keap instinctive to use and it dealt with everything I required– CRM, email marketing, sales funnels, subscription websites, and customer support.
Keap’s CRM and sales and marketing automation are made to aid small companies maintain their customers while adding new ones effortlessly. Automate follow-ups with emails and texts, making sure leads and clients receive the best messages at the right time. Use web site and social media sites types to improve lead follow-up, and handle your development with very easy visit organizing and lead monitoring. Boost sales with automated quoting, invoicing, and payment processing, freeing up your time. With Keap, small companies can conserve 10 hours weekly and rise income by 39%. Start with a 14-day free trial, no bank card required.
Why we like Keap
Keap supplies a detailed client partnership administration (CRM) and marketing automation remedy customized for small companies and entrepreneurs. We value Keap’s focus on streamlining sales processes and supporting consumer relationships through powerful automation tools. The platform’s all-in-one approach integrates CRM, email marketing, invoicing, and job management, making it especially appealing for organizations aiming to combine their tech stack.
For the most part, it just worked accurately with marginal difficulty or upkeep called for. My open and click-through rates were fantastic (like 35% terrific). Automations ran efficiently with no issues.
So why in the world was I lured to uproot my entire operational structure from a system that functioned to try something unproven and untried?
In knowledge I can admit I got seduced by the alarm phone call of “shiny things syndrome”. You recognize the sensation: when every person’s discussing a brand-new device that will change your organization … The yard often looks greener beyond, and I asked yourself whether GoHighLevel may reduce friction points that I would certainly learned to tolerate for many years with Keap.
I withstood initially, yet a few even more aggravations led me to believe perhaps it was time for a modification.
The Investment: Moving My Company to GoHighLevel
Previously this year I chose to take the plunge. I registered for HighLevel’s Agency plan at $297/month, spending dramatically more than the $97/month starter cost.
This wasn’t a decision I ignored. I understood switching over systems was mosting likely to require migrating all my Keap information and basically rebuilding my entire technology infrastructure from scratch utilizing every one of the GoHighLevel integrations readily available.
Here’s a review of simply a few of the initiative required:
- By hand exporting 20,000+ email subscriber documents
- Recreating dozens of automations and workflows
- Moving client accounts, notes, and job information to the brand-new CRM
- Reconfiguring my Stripe invoicing integration
- Setting up landing pages, promotions, and sales funnels throughout again
- Learning a totally foreign UX and user interface design
All in, I invested around 30-40 tedious hours of arrangement job transitioning every little thing over– as well as handling lost productivity throughout the switch.
But ultimately, it was a calculated investment I wanted to make. I figured some short-term discomfort would certainly pay off with GoHighLevel offering a much better long-lasting service for my service, Dripify. Oh exactly how incorrect I was …
It just took me concerning a month of hands-on usage to recognize I had actually made a big blunder. The issues started piling up promptly, till it got to a point I needed to reduce my losses and switch back to Keap entirely.
Allow’s walk through the nightmarish issues I experienced.
Safety And Security Issues & Several Bugs
Provided GoHighLevel placed itself as an all-in-one automation system, I made sure to diligently recreate each and every single workflow from my old Keap account.
These included series for onboarding new e-mail subscribers, onboarding brand-new customers, automating follow-ups for webinar registrations, sending event pointers, handling membership expirations and much more.
Whatever appeared to be functioning penalty … until instantly it had not been. One morning, I woke up to locate 171 completely unnecessary emails had been sent to customers that should NOT have actually received them. This happened three days in a row, with a different batch of 160 individuals daily.
I desperately tried repairing and reconstructing the automation from the ground up. Yet the issue continued.
When I seriously connected to their assistance team, they slightly claimed “web server issues” were responsible. However this description didn’t make any kind of feeling, given that the mistakes continued taking place each early morning like clockwork unconnected to any kind of downtime.
In my mind, this enormous failing was entirely unacceptable and just didn’t benefit my business. I have thousands of get in touches with relying on my automated campaigns running smoothly.
So if GoHighLevel was mosting likely to be entirely unstable, exactly how could I delegate mission-critical workflows and sensitive client information to their innovation?
The unintuitive user interface just worsened these concerns …
Irritating UX
Coming from Keap where whatever was seamless and user-friendly, GoHighLevel’s learning curve really felt high and complicated.
Simple tasks like editing and enhancing workflows entailed excavating through menu systems that were all over the place. Key settings were unexplainably spread in absolutely different sections. Moving between functions felt disjointed or confusing.
I’ll inform you what I mean by discussing their funnel builder as an instance. There were 3 different settings panels to manage total, private, and item arrangements. Yet for some insane reason, the links to gain access to each of these core settings were expanded on contrary sides of the screen. What!?
As someone who values tidy, thoughtful style, this seriously irritated me.
It enhanced that GoHighLevel still felt like a work-in-progress instead of a sleek item all set for prime-time usage. Their top priorities seemed focused on cramming in every feature under the sun, with inadequate usability as a second thought.
And speaking of features, I soon realized the small cost tag featured pricey concessions …
Deceptive Pricing GoHighLevel For Sales Teams
Among GoHighLevel’s largest selling points is the cost effective cost for accessibility to many features. However I swiftly discovered this economical base expense was deceitful.
They nickle-and-dimed individuals with occasional fees for core functionality. Instantly my credit card declarations had obscure $10 fees from GoHighLevel occasionally.
As it turned out, you obtain billed each time you send an e-mail through their servers. So for high quantity individuals, this amounted to thousands of bucks in unanticipated prices.
Between these per-email costs and paying additional for deliverability attachments like Mailgun, my “inexpensive” GoHighLevel membership ended up setting you back dramatically MORE than my Keap plan.
The low price tag was appealing, but just not practical in practice. This bait-and-switch left a negative preference in my mouth.
Email Rates Suffered
The last dealbreaker was seeing my very carefully nurtured e-mail open prices plummet nearly overnight after switching over to GoHighLevel.
Previously, my target market interaction continually hit 35-40% open rates in Keap month after month. But once I moved their records over to GoHighLevel, efficiency tanked immediately to a pitiful 9% open price.
Despite how much I enhanced my sending practices or attempted every troubleshooting trick, I can barely nudge open prices back right into the teenagers– still a 50%+ decrease from my previous standards GoHighLevel For Sales Teams.
Let me repeat: my exact same target market and emails all of a sudden had horrible interaction. The only thing I might believe that would be creating this was whatever was taking place behind the scenes at GoHighLevel. For a firm so dependent on e-mail marketing, this was a big deal.
Between the debilitating deliverability concerns, hidden fees, broken features, and terrible 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 understood I had made a huge mistake. The cons considerably outweighed any kind of advantages.
No software is best, yet the large volume of troubles was beyond acceptable.
At the end of the day, software boils down to trust fund. If I can’t trust it to take care of essential functions effectively or believe a supplier has my best interests in mind, after that it’s time to walk away– also after investing substantial time, money, and effort moving.
So I made the tough phone call to reverse course and return back to Keap completely simply weeks after going all in on GoHighLevel. Let’s explore what I gained from this fiasco.
Trick Takeaways: What I Learned From My GoHighLevel Mistake
My time with HighLevel can be summarized as an expensive misadventure. However in hindsight, it instructed me a couple of vital lessons:
- Stick to what works. Don’t disturb what’s working unless something is definitively better across the board. Change brings danger.
- Vet claims extensively. Marketing buzz around brand-new software program usually obscures larger underlying defects. Deep due persistance is essential.
- Choose simpleness over features. Well-designed tools should make your work life much easier, not more challenging and unpleasant.
- Transparency develops depend on. Nontransparent pricing, questionable reseller terms, and finger-pointing to escape troubles ruins trust fund.
- Seek unbiased reviews. Pleased support evaluates suggest less if too much concerns imply inadequate overall usability.
- Excellence is impossible. No single service can flawlessly fulfill every special service requirement. Locate the least-bad fit.
- Advancement over change. Incremental improvements usually outweigh dangerous wholesale reinvention of what currently functions penalty.
In short, I learned to be a lot more cynical of “as well excellent to be true” marketing claims and less tempted by the attraction of shiny brand-new things. The tools you use daily must gain trust fund via openness and performance, not glossy advertising.