As a firm proprietor for over a years, I rely on software application and automation to simplify procedures and supply outcomes. So when GoHighLevel emerged on the scene couple of years back, it most definitely captured my attention GoHighLevel Gym Playbook.
The concept was appealing– an all-in-one client administration system with marketing, sales, and service devices integrated with each other. As an entrepreneur constantly wanting to simplify and scale my service, it felt like a desire come true on paper. That wouldn’t want a solitary service that does it all?
But in this extensive GoHighLevel testimonial, I’ll take you inside my disastrous journey of trying (and failing) to switch to this preferred new software program. You’ll find out:
If you’re taking into consideration whether GoHighLevel is right for your own service demands, with any luck you can learn from my painful blunders and pumped up assumptions.
Looter: I do NOT advise GoHighLevel. If you require a CRM, begin with this listing of finest CRMs rather. I utilize Keap.
Some GoHighLevel Alternatives
If you’re looking for a sales, marketing, and job monitoring choice to GoHighLevel, then right here are a few we advise.
Backstory: Why I Thought About Switching 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 counting on Keap (previously Infusionsoft) to satisfy all my client monitoring and automation requirements.
I found Keap user-friendly to use and it dealt with whatever I required– CRM, email marketing, sales funnels, membership sites, and client assistance.
Keap’s CRM and sales and marketing automation are designed to assist small companies maintain their clients while including brand-new ones easily. Automate follow-ups with e-mails and texts, ensuring leads and customers receive the right messages at the right time. Usage internet site and social media kinds to improve lead follow-up, and handle your development with simple appointment organizing and lead tracking. Boost sales with automated estimating, invoicing, and repayment processing, maximizing your time. With Keap, local business can save 10 hours per week and increase revenue by 39%. Start with a 14-day free trial, no credit card required.
Why we like Keap
Keap offers a comprehensive consumer connection administration (CRM) and marketing automation remedy tailored for small businesses and entrepreneurs. We appreciate Keap’s concentrate on streamlining sales processes and supporting client relationships via effective automation tools. The platform’s all-in-one technique incorporates CRM, email marketing, invoicing, and task administration, making it especially attractive for services wanting to combine their tech pile.
Generally, it simply functioned reliably with very little difficulty or maintenance required. My open and click-through prices were great (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 unverified and untried?
In hindsight I can confess I got attracted by the siren telephone call of “shiny item disorder”. You know the sensation: when everyone’s speaking about a new device that will change your company … The lawn commonly looks greener beyond, and I asked yourself whether GoHighLevel might reduce rubbing points that I ‘d discovered to tolerate throughout the years with Keap.
I withstood at first, but a couple of even more irritations led me to think possibly it was time for a change.
The Financial investment: Moving My Company to GoHighLevel
Previously this year I made a decision to start. I signed up for HighLevel’s Firm plan at $297/month, investing significantly greater than the $97/month starter price.
This had not been a decision I took lightly. I understood switching systems was going to need moving all my Keap information and basically restoring my entire technology facilities from scratch making use of all of the GoHighLevel integrations available.
Below’s an introduction of simply some of the initiative needed:
- By hand exporting 20,000+ e-mail client documents
- Recreating loads of automations and workflows
- Moving client accounts, notes, and task data to the new CRM
- Reconfiguring my Stripe invoicing integration
- Establishing landing pages, discounts, and sales funnels all over once more
- Learning an entirely foreign UX and user interface style
Done in, I invested around 30-40 laborious hours of arrangement work transitioning every little thing over– not to mention taking care of lost productivity throughout the switch.
Yet ultimately, it was a computed financial investment I wanted to make. I figured some short-term pain would certainly repay with GoHighLevel giving a far better long-term option for my company, Dripify. Oh just how wrong I was …
It only took me regarding a month of hands-on usage to realize I had actually made a big error. The problems started piling up swiftly, till it reached a point I needed to cut my losses and change back to Keap totally.
Allow’s walk through the nightmarish issues I ran into.
Safety Issues & Several Vermin
Provided GoHighLevel placed itself as an all-in-one automation system, I made sure to diligently recreate every workflow from my old Keap account.
These consisted of series for onboarding new email clients, onboarding new clients, automating follow-ups for webinar enrollments, sending out occasion suggestions, handling subscription expiries and much more.
Everything seemed to be working fine … till instantly it had not been. One early morning, I woke up to find 171 entirely irrelevant emails had actually been sent to users who need to NOT have actually obtained them. This happened three days straight, with a different batch of 160 individuals every day.
I frantically tried repairing and rebuilding the automation from scratch. Yet the issue lingered.
When I frantically reached out to their support team, they vaguely declared “server concerns” were to blame. However this description didn’t make any feeling, considering that the mistakes proceeded taking place each morning like clockwork unassociated to any downtime.
In my mind, this huge failing was completely undesirable and just didn’t benefit my service. I have thousands of get in touches with relying on my automated campaigns running smoothly.
So if GoHighLevel was mosting likely to be totally undependable, exactly how could I leave mission-critical workflows and sensitive customer data to their modern technology?
The unintuitive user interface only intensified these issues …
Aggravating UX
Coming from Keap where everything was seamless and instinctive, GoHighLevel’s learning contour really felt steep and complex.
Easy jobs like modifying workflows included excavating through menu systems that were all over the place. Secret settings were unexplainably scattered in completely various sections. Relocating between features felt disjointed or confusing.
I’ll tell you what I suggest by speaking about their funnel builder as an instance. There were 3 separate setups panels to manage total, specific, and product setups. Yet for some crazy factor, the web links to accessibility each of these core setups were spread out on contrary sides of the screen. What!?
As someone that values clean, thoughtful layout, this seriously annoyed me.
It reinforced that GoHighLevel still seemed like a work-in-progress instead of a sleek item all set for prime-time use. Their top priorities appeared focused on cramming in every feature imaginable, with poor usability as an afterthought.
And speaking of features, I soon realized the low cost tag featured expensive compromises …
Deceptive Pricing GoHighLevel Gym Playbook
Among GoHighLevel’s largest marketing points is the budget-friendly cost for accessibility to so many features. However I promptly learned this low-cost base expense was deceitful.
They nickle-and-dimed users with occasional costs for core performance. Suddenly my bank card statements had obscure $10 costs from GoHighLevel here and there.
As it turned out, you obtain charged every single time you send out an e-mail through their servers. So for high quantity users, this added up to hundreds of dollars in unexpected costs.
In between these per-email costs and paying extra for deliverability attachments like Mailgun, my “economical” GoHighLevel subscription wound up setting you back considerably greater than my Keap plan.
The reduced sticker price was alluring, but just not reasonable in practice. This bait-and-switch left a bad taste in my mouth.
Email Rates Suffered
The final dealbreaker was seeing my meticulously nurtured e-mail open rates drop almost over night after switching to GoHighLevel.
Formerly, my audience engagement constantly hit 35-40% open prices in Keap month after month. But once I moved their documents over to GoHighLevel, performance tanked instantly to a pathetic 9% open rate.
Despite just how much I enhanced my sending methods or tried every fixing technique, I can hardly nudge open rates back into the teenagers– still a 50%+ decline from my previous benchmarks GoHighLevel Gym Playbook.
Let me repeat: my exact same target market and emails suddenly had dreadful interaction. The only thing I could believe that would certainly be triggering this was whatever was occurring behind the scenes at GoHighLevel. For a firm so depending on e-mail marketing, this was a big deal.
In between the debilitating deliverability concerns, concealed costs, busted features, and horrible interface, I had finally reached my limit …
Why I Quit GoHighLevel after 37 Days
Just 45 days after moving my firm to GoHighLevel, I knew I had made a massive blunder. The disadvantages dramatically outweighed any type of advantages.
No software is ideal, however the large volume of issues was past acceptable.
At the end of the day, software program comes down to count on. If I can not trust it to deal with important functions properly or believe a vendor has my best interests in mind, after that it’s time to walk away– also after spending substantial time, money, and initiative moving.
So I made the tough phone call to reverse program and return back to Keap totally simply weeks after going all in on GoHighLevel. Let’s discover what I picked up from this debacle.
Trick Takeaways: What I Learned From My GoHighLevel Error
My time with HighLevel can be summarized as a costly accident. Yet in hindsight, it showed me a few essential lessons:
- Stay with what jobs. Do not distress what’s functioning unless something is definitively much better across the board. Change brings threat.
- Veterinarian asserts extensively. Marketing buzz around new software usually covers larger underlying problems. Deep due persistance is essential.
- Pick simpleness over features. Well-designed devices must make your job life much easier, not a lot more complex and messy.
- Transparency builds depend on. Opaque pricing, questionable reseller terms, and finger-pointing to escape issues destroys depend on.
- Look for unbiased testimonials. Satisfied support reviews indicate much less if too much concerns suggest bad total use.
- Perfection is difficult. No single option can completely fulfill every special organization need. Discover the least-bad fit.
- Advancement over revolution. Incremental improvements generally surpass risky wholesale reinvention of what currently functions penalty.
In short, I found out to be more cynical of “as well good to be true” marketing claims and less attracted by the appeal of glossy brand-new items. The tools you make use of daily need to gain trust through openness and performance, not slick advertising.