As a company owner for over a years, I rely on software program and automation to streamline procedures and provide results. So when GoHighLevel arised on the scene couple of years back, it definitely captured my interest GoHighLevel For Staffing Agencies.
The idea was attractive– an all-in-one client monitoring system with marketing, sales, and service devices incorporated together. As a business owner constantly wanting to simplify and scale my company, it seemed like a desire come true on paper. Who would not desire a single remedy that does it all?
Yet in this comprehensive GoHighLevel review, I’ll take you inside my disastrous trip of attempting (and failing) to switch to this prominent brand-new software. You’ll discover:
If you’re thinking about whether GoHighLevel is right for your very own service demands, hopefully you can pick up from my uncomfortable errors and pumped up assumptions.
Looter: I do NOT advise GoHighLevel. If you need a CRM, start with this list of best CRMs rather. I use Keap.
Some GoHighLevel Alternatives
If you’re seeking a sales, marketing, and task monitoring alternative to GoHighLevel, then below are a few we advise.
Backstory: Why I Considered Changing from Keap
To comprehend what attracted me to GoHighLevel in the first place, you need context regarding my previous configuration. For over 5 years I had actually been gladly relying upon Keap (formerly Infusionsoft) to fulfill all my customer monitoring and automation requirements.
I discovered Keap intuitive to use and it took care of every little thing I required– CRM, e-mail marketing, sales funnels, membership websites, and client support.
Keap’s CRM and sales and marketing automation are made to aid small companies maintain their customers while including new ones easily. Automate follow-ups with emails and texts, making certain leads and clients receive the right messages at the right time. Usage website and social media sites kinds to enhance lead follow-up, and manage your development with easy appointment scheduling and lead monitoring. Boost sales with automated estimating, invoicing, and payment processing, maximizing your time. With Keap, small businesses can save 10 hours each week and rise earnings by 39%. Beginning with a 14-day free trial, no charge card called for.
Why we like Keap
Keap uses a detailed client partnership monitoring (CRM) and marketing automation option customized for small companies and entrepreneurs. We value Keap’s focus on improving sales procedures and supporting client partnerships through effective automation devices. The platform’s all-in-one technique incorporates CRM, e-mail marketing, invoicing, and job management, making it especially eye-catching for businesses looking to combine their tech stack.
Generally, it just functioned reliably with very little hassle or upkeep needed. My open and click-through prices were terrific (like 35% great). Automations ran efficiently without concerns.
So why in the world was I attracted to uproot my entire operational foundation from a system that functioned to try something unverified and untested?
In knowledge I can confess I obtained attracted by the alarm telephone call of “glossy object disorder”. You recognize the sensation: when every person’s talking about a new device that will certainly revolutionize your business … The yard usually looks greener beyond, and I wondered whether GoHighLevel could reduce rubbing factors that I would certainly learned to tolerate throughout the years with Keap.
I withstood in the beginning, yet a few more irritations led me to assume possibly it was time for an adjustment.
The Financial investment: Moving My Agency to GoHighLevel
Earlier this year I determined to take the plunge. I enrolled in HighLevel’s Firm plan at $297/month, investing substantially more than the $97/month starter price.
This wasn’t a choice I ignored. I understood changing systems was going to call for moving all my Keap data and basically restoring my whole tech infrastructure from scratch using all of the GoHighLevel integrations available.
Here’s a review of just some of the effort called for:
- Manually exporting 20,000+ email client records
- Recreating lots of automations and workflows
- Moving customer profiles, notes, and task information to the brand-new CRM
- Reconfiguring my Stripe invoicing integration
- Setting up landing pages, coupons, and sales funnels all over once more
- Learning a completely international UX and user interface layout
All in, I invested around 30-40 tiresome hours of setup job transitioning every little thing over– in addition to managing lost productivity throughout the switch.
Yet ultimately, it was a computed financial investment I was willing to make. I figured some short-term pain would repay with GoHighLevel providing a better long-lasting solution for my business, Dripify. Oh how incorrect I was …
It just took me about a month of hands-on use to realize I had made a large error. The problems began accumulating quickly, until it reached a factor I had to reduce my losses and switch over back to Keap completely.
Allow’s walk through the horrible problems I came across.
Protection Issues & Several Vermin
Offered GoHighLevel placed itself as an all-in-one automation platform, I made sure to thoroughly 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 subscription expirations and far more.
Whatever appeared to be operating fine … until all of a sudden it wasn’t. One early morning, I awoke to locate 171 completely unimportant emails had actually been sent out to individuals who ought to NOT have actually obtained them. This took place three days straight, with a different set of 160 people each day.
I frantically attempted repairing and restoring the automation from the ground up. Yet the problem lingered.
When I frantically reached out to their assistance group, they vaguely claimed “web server problems” were responsible. However this description didn’t make any kind of sense, considering that the errors proceeded happening each morning like clockwork unconnected to any type of downtime.
In my mind, this large failure was totally unacceptable and just really did not work for my company. I have thousands of calls counting on my automated campaigns running efficiently.
So if GoHighLevel was mosting likely to be absolutely unreliable, exactly how could I leave mission-critical workflows and sensitive customer data to their technology?
The unintuitive interface just worsened these problems …
Frustrating UX
Coming from Keap where whatever was smooth and instinctive, GoHighLevel’s learning contour felt high and difficult.
Simple jobs like editing workflows included digging through menu systems that were all over the place. Secret settings were unexplainably spread in entirely various areas. Relocating in between functions felt disjointed or confusing.
I’ll inform you what I indicate by discussing their funnel builder as an example. There were 3 separate settings panels to take care of overall, individual, and item configurations. Yet for some insane reason, the web links to gain access to each of these core settings were spread out on contrary sides of the display. What!?
As somebody that values tidy, thoughtful design, this seriously annoyed me.
It strengthened that GoHighLevel still seemed like a work-in-progress as opposed to a sleek product ready for prime-time use. Their priorities appeared concentrated on packing in every feature under the sun, with inadequate use as an afterthought.
And speaking of features, I quickly recognized the low cost tag came with costly compromises …
Misleading Pricing GoHighLevel For Staffing Agencies
One of GoHighLevel’s greatest marketing factors is the budget friendly price for accessibility to so many features. However I rapidly learned this low-cost base cost was misleading.
They nickle-and-dimed users with sporadic costs for core functionality. Suddenly my bank card statements had unclear $10 costs from GoHighLevel occasionally.
As it turned out, you obtain billed every time you send out an e-mail with their servers. So for high quantity individuals, this amounted to hundreds of dollars in unanticipated expenses.
Between these per-email charges and paying extra for deliverability attachments like Mailgun, my “economical” GoHighLevel registration ended up costing considerably MORE than my Keap plan.
The reduced price tag was tempting, but just not practical in practice. This bait-and-switch left a poor taste in my mouth.
Email Rates Suffered
The final dealbreaker was seeing my very carefully supported email open rates drop nearly overnight after switching over to GoHighLevel.
Formerly, my target market engagement regularly hit 35-40% open rates in Keap month after month. But once I moved their documents over to GoHighLevel, performance tanked immediately to a worthless 9% open rate.
Regardless of just how much I maximized my sending out practices or tried every repairing method, I could barely push open prices back into the teenagers– still a 50%+ decline from my previous benchmarks GoHighLevel For Staffing Agencies.
Let me repeat: my exact same audience and e-mails instantly had awful engagement. The only point I can assume that would be creating this was whatever was taking place behind the scenes at GoHighLevel. For a company so based on email marketing, this was a big deal.
In between the crippling deliverability issues, hidden charges, broken features, and terrible user interface, I had ultimately reached my limit …
Why I Quit GoHighLevel after 37 Days
Simply 45 days after migrating my firm to GoHighLevel, I understood I had actually made a substantial blunder. The cons significantly surpassed any type of benefits.
No software is perfect, yet the sheer quantity of problems was past appropriate.
At the end of the day, software program boils down to count on. If I can not trust it to manage crucial functions competently or think a supplier has my best interests in mind, after that it’s time to leave– even after spending considerable time, money, and initiative migrating.
So I made the hard contact us to turn around course and return back to Keap totally just weeks after going done in on GoHighLevel. Allow’s explore what I gained from this ordeal.
Key Takeaways: What I Learned From My GoHighLevel Blunder
My time with HighLevel can be summed up as a costly ill fortune. However in hindsight, it educated me a couple of vital lessons:
- Stay with what jobs. Don’t distress what’s working unless something is definitively far better across the board. Adjustment brings danger.
- Veterinarian declares thoroughly. Marketing hype around brand-new software program usually covers bigger underlying defects. Deep due persistance is essential.
- Select simpleness over features. Properly designed tools need to make your work life simpler, not much more complex and untidy.
- Transparency develops trust fund. Opaque pricing, dubious reseller terms, and finger-pointing to avert issues ruins depend on.
- Seek impartial testimonials. Satisfied support examines mean much less if excessive concerns imply inadequate general usability.
- Perfection is impossible. No solitary option can perfectly satisfy every special organization demand. Locate the least-bad fit.
- Advancement over revolution. Incremental enhancements normally exceed dangerous wholesale reinvention of what already functions fine.
Simply put, I learned to be a lot more hesitant of “as well good to be real” marketing cases and less tempted by the appeal of shiny brand-new objects. The tools you make use of daily should earn trust fund via openness and performance, not slick advertising.