As a company proprietor for over a decade, I depend on software and automation to simplify operations and provide results. So when GoHighLevel arised on the scene couple of years back, it most definitely caught my focus GoHighLevel Partner Certification Program.
The concept was enticing– an all-in-one client monitoring platform with marketing, sales, and solution devices incorporated with each other. As an entrepreneur constantly seeking to streamline and scale my service, it looked like a desire come to life theoretically. That wouldn’t want a solitary option that does it all?
Yet in this in-depth GoHighLevel review, I’ll take you inside my devastating trip of trying (and failing) to change to this prominent brand-new software application. You’ll learn:
If you’re considering whether GoHighLevel is right for your very own business needs, hopefully you can learn from my painful errors and blew up assumptions.
Looter: I do NOT suggest GoHighLevel. If you require a CRM, begin with this checklist of best CRMs instead. I use Keap.
Some GoHighLevel Alternatives
If you’re looking for a sales, marketing, and job administration choice to GoHighLevel, then below are a few we suggest.
Backstory: Why I Took Into Consideration Switching Over from Keap
To understand what attracted me to GoHighLevel in the first place, you need context concerning my previous arrangement. For over 5 years I had actually been gladly counting on Keap (formerly Infusionsoft) to meet all my client administration and automation demands.
I located Keap instinctive to make use of and it handled whatever I needed– CRM, e-mail marketing, sales funnels, membership sites, and client assistance.
Keap’s CRM and sales and marketing automation are created to aid small businesses maintain their customers while adding brand-new ones effortlessly. Automate follow-ups with emails and messages, guaranteeing leads and customers obtain the appropriate messages at the correct time. Usage site and social media types to improve lead follow-up, and manage your development with simple visit organizing and lead monitoring. Boost sales with automated estimating, invoicing, and settlement processing, liberating your time. With Keap, local business can save 10 hours per week and rise revenue by 39%. Begin with a 14-day free trial, no credit card needed.
Why we like Keap
Keap offers a detailed client relationship monitoring (CRM) and marketing automation solution tailored for small businesses and business owners. We value Keap’s concentrate on improving sales processes and nurturing consumer partnerships via effective automation tools. The platform’s all-in-one strategy incorporates CRM, email marketing, invoicing, and job management, making it particularly attractive for businesses aiming to combine their tech stack.
Generally, it just worked reliably with marginal hassle or upkeep called for. My open and click-through prices were excellent (like 35% excellent). Automations ran efficiently without concerns.
So why in the world was I attracted to uproot my entire operational foundation from a system that worked to try something unproven and untested?
In knowledge I can confess I obtained seduced by the siren phone call of “glossy item disorder”. You recognize the feeling: when everyone’s speaking about a new tool that will certainly reinvent your business … The turf commonly looks greener beyond, and I wondered whether GoHighLevel might minimize rubbing factors that I would certainly learned to endure for many years with Keap.
I resisted initially, yet a few more stress led me to believe perhaps it was time for a modification.
The Financial investment: Moving My Company to GoHighLevel
Earlier this year I determined to start. I signed up for HighLevel’s Company plan at $297/month, spending dramatically greater than the $97/month starter expense.
This had not been a decision I took lightly. I recognized switching platforms was mosting likely to require migrating all my Keap data and essentially rebuilding my entire technology framework from square one making use of all of the GoHighLevel integrations available.
Below’s an overview of simply some of the effort called for:
- Manually exporting 20,000+ e-mail customer documents
- Recreating dozens of automations and workflows
- Relocating customer accounts, notes, and task information to the brand-new CRM
- Reconfiguring my Stripe invoicing integration
- Establishing landing pages, coupons, and sales funnels all over once again
- Learning a totally foreign UX and interface layout
All in, I spent around 30-40 laborious hours of arrangement work transitioning whatever over– not to mention taking care of lost efficiency during the button.
Yet eventually, it was a calculated financial investment I was willing to make. I figured some short-term pain would pay off with GoHighLevel providing a better lasting option for my organization, Dripify. Oh just how wrong I was …
It just took me concerning a month of hands-on use to realize I had actually made a large error. The problems began accumulating rapidly, until it got to a factor I had to reduce my losses and change back to Keap entirely.
Let’s walk through the nightmarish issues I experienced.
Security Issues & Several Bugs
Offered GoHighLevel placed itself as an all-in-one automation system, I made sure to thoroughly recreate each and every single workflow from my old Keap account.
These consisted of sequences for onboarding new e-mail clients, onboarding brand-new customers, automating follow-ups for webinar enrollments, sending event reminders, handling subscription expiries and a lot more.
Everything seemed to be working penalty … up until instantly it wasn’t. One early morning, I awoke to locate 171 totally irrelevant e-mails had been sent out to customers who ought to NOT have actually obtained them. This happened 3 days in a row, with a different batch of 160 individuals every day.
I hysterically tried repairing and restoring the automation from the ground up. However the trouble lingered.
When I desperately connected to their assistance group, they slightly claimed “web server issues” were to blame. However this explanation really did not make any type of feeling, since the mistakes proceeded happening each early morning like clockwork unassociated to any type of downtime.
In my mind, this substantial failing was totally undesirable and just didn’t help my business. I have countless get in touches with relying upon my automated campaigns running efficiently.
So if GoHighLevel was going to be absolutely unstable, just how could I leave mission-critical workflows and sensitive client data to their modern technology?
The unintuitive interface just worsened these problems …
Discouraging UX
Coming from Keap where whatever was seamless and instinctive, GoHighLevel’s learning curve really felt high and challenging.
Straightforward tasks like modifying workflows involved digging through food selection systems that were all over the place. Secret setups were unexplainably spread in entirely different sections. Relocating in between features really felt disjointed or complex.
I’ll inform you what I indicate by speaking about their funnel builder as an example. There were 3 different setups panels to handle total, individual, and item configurations. Yet for some crazy reason, the links to accessibility each of these core setups were spread out on opposite sides of the display. What!?
As a person who values clean, thoughtful style, this seriously irritated me.
It reinforced that GoHighLevel still felt like a work-in-progress rather than a refined item all set for prime-time use. Their top priorities seemed focused on cramming in every feature under the sun, with poor usability as an afterthought.
And speaking of features, I soon recognized the affordable price tag featured costly concessions …
Deceptive Pricing GoHighLevel Partner Certification Program
One of GoHighLevel’s largest marketing points is the budget friendly rate for access to many features. Yet I rapidly discovered this affordable base cost was misleading.
They nickle-and-dimed customers with erratic fees for core capability. All of a sudden my bank card statements had obscure $10 charges from GoHighLevel occasionally.
As it ended up, you obtain billed every single time you send out an e-mail with their web servers. So for high quantity customers, this added up to thousands of dollars in unexpected prices.
Between these per-email costs and paying additional for deliverability attachments like Mailgun, my “inexpensive” GoHighLevel membership ended up costing dramatically greater than my Keap plan.
The reduced sticker price was appealing, but just not sensible in practice. This bait-and-switch left a poor taste in my mouth.
Email Rates Suffered
The last dealbreaker was seeing my very carefully nurtured email open rates drop virtually over night after switching over to GoHighLevel.
Previously, my target market interaction regularly hit 35-40% open prices in Keap month after month. Once I migrated their documents over to GoHighLevel, efficiency tanked immediately to a pathetic 9% open price.
Despite how much I optimized my sending out practices or tried every fixing trick, I might hardly push open prices back right into the teenagers– still a 50%+ decline from my previous benchmarks GoHighLevel Partner Certification Program.
Let me repeat: my exact same target market and e-mails all of a sudden had horrible interaction. The only thing I might believe that would certainly be triggering this was whatever was happening behind the scenes at GoHighLevel. For an agency so based on e-mail marketing, this was a big deal.
Between the debilitating deliverability issues, hidden fees, busted features, and awful user interface, I had actually lastly reached my limit …
Why I Stop GoHighLevel after 37 Days
Just 45 days after moving my company to GoHighLevel, I knew I had made a significant error. The cons significantly outweighed any type of benefits.
No software is perfect, but the sheer quantity of problems was past appropriate.
At the end of the day, software boils down to depend on. If I can not trust it to manage crucial features competently or think a supplier has my best interests in mind, after that it’s time to leave– also after investing considerable time, cash, and effort migrating.
So I made the difficult call to reverse course and return back to Keap entirely just weeks after going done in on GoHighLevel. Let’s explore what I picked up from this ordeal.
Key Takeaways: What I Learned From My GoHighLevel Mistake
My time with HighLevel can be summed up as a costly misadventure. But in knowledge, it taught me a couple of vital lessons:
- Stay with what works. Don’t disturb what’s functioning unless something is definitively far better across the board. Modification brings danger.
- Veterinarian declares completely. Marketing hype around brand-new software application often obscures bigger underlying defects. Deep due persistance is important.
- Select simplicity over features. Properly designed devices need to make your work life less complicated, not much more complicated and messy.
- Openness builds trust. Nontransparent pricing, questionable reseller terms, and finger-pointing to evade problems destroys trust.
- Look for unbiased testimonials. Satisfied support reviews mean less if too much issues indicate bad overall use.
- Excellence is difficult. No single option can flawlessly satisfy every distinct organization requirement. Locate the least-bad fit.
- Advancement over transformation. Step-by-step enhancements generally exceed dangerous wholesale reinvention of what currently works penalty.
Basically, I discovered to be more hesitant of “too great to be true” marketing claims and less lured by the allure of shiny brand-new objects. The tools you use daily must gain count on through openness and performance, not glossy advertising.