As an agency proprietor for over a years, I rely on software and automation to improve operations and deliver outcomes. So when GoHighLevel emerged on the scene few years back, it certainly captured my attention GoHighLevel Lead-Gen Playbook.
The idea was appealing– an all-in-one client administration system with marketing, sales, and solution devices integrated with each other. As a business owner constantly wanting to simplify and scale my service, it appeared like a desire become a reality on paper. That wouldn’t desire a solitary option that does it all?
Yet in this comprehensive GoHighLevel testimonial, I’ll take you inside my dreadful journey of attempting (and stopping working) to switch to this popular brand-new software application. You’ll discover:
If you’re taking into consideration whether GoHighLevel is right for your own service needs, ideally you can learn from my uncomfortable mistakes and blew up assumptions.
Looter: I do NOT recommend GoHighLevel. If you need a CRM, begin with this listing of finest CRMs instead. I utilize Keap.
Some GoHighLevel Alternatives
If you’re looking for a sales, marketing, and project management choice to GoHighLevel, after that here are a couple of we advise.
Backstory: Why I Considered Switching Over from Keap
To comprehend what attracted me to GoHighLevel to begin with, you require context about my previous configuration. For over 5 years I had been gladly relying on Keap (previously Infusionsoft) to satisfy all my client administration and automation demands.
I discovered Keap intuitive to utilize and it handled everything I needed– CRM, email marketing, sales funnels, membership websites, and customer support.
Keap’s CRM and sales and marketing automation are created to aid local business maintain their customers while adding brand-new ones effortlessly. Automate follow-ups with e-mails and messages, making certain leads and clients receive the ideal messages at the correct time. Usage internet site and social networks forms to improve lead follow-up, and handle your growth with simple appointment organizing and lead tracking. Boost sales with automated quoting, invoicing, and repayment processing, maximizing your time. With Keap, small businesses can conserve 10 hours weekly and boost income by 39%. Start with a 14-day free trial, no bank card called for.
Why we like Keap
Keap offers a thorough consumer connection monitoring (CRM) and marketing automation option tailored for small businesses and entrepreneurs. We appreciate Keap’s focus on improving sales processes and nurturing client relationships via powerful automation tools. The system’s all-in-one strategy incorporates CRM, email marketing, invoicing, and job monitoring, making it particularly attractive for organizations looking to settle their tech pile.
Generally, it simply worked accurately with minimal difficulty or upkeep called for. My open and click-through prices were terrific (like 35% excellent). Automations ran efficiently without any problems.
So why on earth was I lured to uproot my whole functional structure from a system that worked to try something unverified and untried?
In knowledge I can admit I obtained seduced by the siren telephone call of “shiny object disorder”. You recognize the sensation: when every person’s talking about a brand-new tool that will certainly transform your company … The yard frequently looks greener on the other side, and I questioned whether GoHighLevel might reduce friction points that I would certainly found out to tolerate throughout the years with Keap.
I stood up to in the beginning, but a couple of more irritations led me to believe possibly it was time for a change.
The Investment: Migrating My Firm to GoHighLevel
Previously this year I made a decision to take the plunge. I enrolled in HighLevel’s Agency plan at $297/month, investing significantly greater than the $97/month starter price.
This had not been a choice I took lightly. I understood changing platforms was going to call for moving all my Keap data and basically rebuilding my entire tech framework from square one making use of every one of the GoHighLevel integrations available.
Below’s an introduction of simply some of the initiative needed:
- Manually exporting 20,000+ email customer records
- Recreating loads of automations and workflows
- Relocating customer accounts, notes, and task information to the new CRM
- Reconfiguring my Stripe billing integration
- Setting up landing pages, promotions, and sales funnels throughout once more
- Learning an entirely foreign UX and user interface design
Done in, I spent around 30-40 laborious hours of setup work transitioning every little thing over– and also managing lost performance during the switch.
Yet eventually, it was a computed financial investment I wanted to make. I figured some short-term discomfort would certainly pay off with GoHighLevel offering a far better long-term service for my company, Dripify. Oh how wrong I was …
It only took me about a month of hands-on use to realize I had actually made a large error. The concerns started accumulating swiftly, up until it got to a point I needed to reduce my losses and change back to Keap completely.
Allow’s walk through the nightmarish troubles I experienced.
Safety And Security Issues & Several Bugs
Given GoHighLevel placed itself as an all-in-one automation system, I took care to meticulously recreate every single workflow from my old Keap account.
These included series for onboarding brand-new e-mail clients, onboarding new customers, automating follow-ups for webinar enrollments, sending occasion pointers, handling membership expirations and a lot more.
Everything appeared to be functioning fine … up until unexpectedly it wasn’t. One early morning, I awoke to discover 171 totally unimportant e-mails had been sent out to customers that ought to NOT have gotten them. This happened three days in a row, with a various set of 160 individuals every day.
I anxiously tried troubleshooting and rebuilding the automation from square one. Yet the issue continued.
When I seriously reached out to their assistance group, they slightly claimed “server concerns” were at fault. Yet this description really did not make any feeling, because the errors proceeded happening each morning like clockwork unconnected to any type of downtime.
In my mind, this enormous failing was totally undesirable and simply didn’t work for my business. I have hundreds of contacts depending on my automated campaigns running efficiently.
So if GoHighLevel was going to be absolutely undependable, how could I turn over mission-critical workflows and delicate client information to their modern technology?
The unintuitive user interface only intensified these problems …
Discouraging UX
Coming from Keap where every little thing was seamless and instinctive, GoHighLevel’s learning curve felt high and challenging.
Easy tasks like editing and enhancing workflows entailed digging via menu systems that were all over the place. Key setups were unexplainably spread in entirely different sections. Moving in between features really felt disjointed or complicated.
I’ll tell you what I indicate by talking about their funnel builder as an example. There were 3 separate setups panels to handle general, individual, and item arrangements. Yet for some crazy factor, the links to gain access to each of these core setups were expanded on contrary sides of the screen. What!?
As somebody who values tidy, thoughtful design, this seriously frustrated me.
It enhanced that GoHighLevel still felt like a work-in-progress as opposed to a refined item ready for prime-time usage. Their priorities appeared focused on packing in every feature imaginable, with poor functionality as an afterthought.
And speaking of features, I soon realized the low price tag came with expensive compromises …
Misleading Pricing GoHighLevel Lead-Gen Playbook
One of GoHighLevel’s greatest selling points is the budget friendly price for accessibility to numerous features. Yet I quickly discovered this inexpensive base expense was deceptive.
They nickle-and-dimed users with sporadic fees for core capability. Suddenly my credit card declarations had vague $10 fees from GoHighLevel here and there.
As it ended up, you obtain charged whenever you send an e-mail via their servers. So for high quantity individuals, this amounted to thousands of dollars in unanticipated prices.
In between these per-email costs and paying extra for deliverability attachments like Mailgun, my “inexpensive” GoHighLevel registration ended up setting you back considerably greater than my Keap plan.
The low price tag was alluring, yet just not realistic in practice. This bait-and-switch left a bad preference in my mouth.
Email Rates Suffered
The final dealbreaker was seeing my very carefully nurtured e-mail open rates plunge practically overnight after switching to GoHighLevel.
Previously, my audience involvement consistently struck 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 price.
Regardless of how much I enhanced my sending out practices or attempted every repairing method, I might hardly nudge open rates back right into the teens– still a 50%+ decrease from my previous standards GoHighLevel Lead-Gen Playbook.
Let me repeat: my exact same target market and emails all of a sudden had dreadful engagement. The only thing I could assume 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.
In between the crippling deliverability concerns, hidden charges, busted features, and dreadful user interface, I had finally reached my restriction …
Why I Quit GoHighLevel after 37 Days
Simply 45 days after moving my agency to GoHighLevel, I recognized I had made a huge blunder. The disadvantages drastically surpassed any type of advantages.
No software application is ideal, but the sheer quantity of issues was beyond acceptable.
At the end of the day, software application comes down to count on. If I can’t trust it to take care of important functions capably or think a supplier has my best interests in mind, after that it’s time to walk away– even after investing significant time, money, and initiative moving.
So I made the challenging call to turn around program and return back to Keap completely simply weeks after going done in on GoHighLevel. Allow’s explore what I learned from this debacle.
Secret Takeaways: What I Learned From My GoHighLevel Mistake
My time with HighLevel can be summed up as a costly misadventure. However in hindsight, it instructed me a couple of essential lessons:
- Stay with what jobs. Don’t upset what’s functioning unless something is definitively much better across the board. Adjustment brings threat.
- Vet asserts completely. Marketing hype around new software program commonly obscures bigger underlying problems. Deep due persistance is vital.
- Choose simplicity over features. Well-designed devices should make your work life much easier, not more challenging and messy.
- Transparency builds depend on. Opaque pricing, unethical reseller terms, and finger-pointing to evade problems damages count on.
- Seek unbiased reviews. Happy assistance evaluates imply much less if extreme issues imply poor overall functionality.
- Excellence is impossible. No solitary remedy can completely satisfy every unique business demand. Discover the least-bad fit.
- Evolution over transformation. Step-by-step renovations typically exceed high-risk wholesale reinvention of what currently works penalty.
In short, I learned to be more cynical of “too good to be real” marketing claims and much less tempted by the allure of glossy brand-new objects. The devices you make use of daily should earn trust with openness and performance, not glossy advertising.