As a firm proprietor for over a decade, I depend on software application and automation to streamline procedures and provide outcomes. So when GoHighLevel arised on the scene couple of years back, it certainly captured my attention GoHighLevel Paulson Thomas.
The concept was appealing– an all-in-one client monitoring system with marketing, sales, and service devices integrated together. As a business owner constantly wanting to simplify and scale my service, it felt like a dream happened on paper. Who wouldn’t want a single service that does it all?
But in this thorough GoHighLevel review, I’ll take you inside my disastrous journey of attempting (and stopping working) to change to this prominent new software. You’ll learn:
If you’re taking into consideration whether GoHighLevel is right for your own company demands, with any luck you can gain from my uncomfortable blunders and inflated expectations.
Looter: I do NOT suggest GoHighLevel. If you need a CRM, start with this listing of ideal CRMs rather. I make use of Keap.
Some GoHighLevel Alternatives
If you’re looking for a sales, marketing, and job management alternative to GoHighLevel, after that here are a couple of we suggest.
Backstory: Why I Took Into Consideration Switching from Keap
To comprehend what attracted me to GoHighLevel in the first place, you require context about my previous setup. For over 5 years I had actually been gladly relying on Keap (formerly Infusionsoft) to satisfy all my customer monitoring and automation requirements.
I found Keap user-friendly to make use of and it dealt with every little thing I needed– CRM, email marketing, sales funnels, membership sites, and client assistance.
Keap’s CRM and sales and marketing automation are made to aid small businesses maintain their customers while adding new ones effortlessly. Automate follow-ups with e-mails and texts, ensuring leads and clients receive the appropriate messages at the correct time. Usage internet site and social media sites forms to improve lead follow-up, and handle your development with easy visit organizing and lead tracking. Boost sales with automated estimating, invoicing, and payment processing, freeing up your time. With Keap, small companies can conserve 10 hours per week and increase revenue by 39%. Beginning with a 14-day free trial, no bank card needed.
Why we like Keap
Keap offers a thorough customer relationship administration (CRM) and marketing automation option tailored for small businesses and entrepreneurs. We appreciate Keap’s focus on improving sales processes and nurturing customer connections with effective automation devices. The system’s all-in-one method incorporates CRM, email marketing, invoicing, and task management, making it especially appealing for businesses wanting to settle their technology pile.
For the most part, it simply worked dependably with very little hassle or upkeep called for. My open and click-through prices were fantastic (like 35% fantastic). Automations ran efficiently without any issues.
So why on earth was I attracted to uproot my entire operational foundation from a system that worked to try something unproven and untested?
In hindsight I can admit I obtained attracted by the siren phone call of “shiny item syndrome”. You know the sensation: when everyone’s talking about a brand-new tool that will certainly revolutionize your business … The lawn typically looks greener beyond, and I asked yourself whether GoHighLevel may lower rubbing points that I would certainly learned to tolerate for many years with Keap.
I stood up to initially, but a couple of even more stress led me to assume possibly it was time for a modification.
The Investment: Moving My Firm to GoHighLevel
Previously this year I chose to start. I registered for HighLevel’s Company plan at $297/month, spending substantially greater than the $97/month starter price.
This wasn’t a choice I ignored. I recognized switching over platforms was mosting likely to require moving all my Keap information and basically restoring my entire tech framework from the ground up using all of the GoHighLevel integrations offered.
Right here’s an introduction of simply some of the effort required:
- By hand exporting 20,000+ e-mail subscriber documents
- Recreating loads of automations and workflows
- Relocating client profiles, notes, and project information to the new CRM
- Reconfiguring my Stripe payment integration
- Establishing landing pages, discounts, and sales funnels all over again
- Learning a totally foreign UX and user interface style
All in, I invested around 30-40 laborious hours of arrangement work transitioning everything over– in addition to dealing with shed efficiency during the button.
Yet eventually, it was a computed investment I wanted to make. I figured some short-term pain would repay with GoHighLevel supplying a better long-term remedy for my company, Dripify. Oh just how incorrect I was …
It just took me regarding a month of hands-on usage to recognize I had actually made a large mistake. The concerns started piling up quickly, till it got to a point I needed to cut my losses and switch over back to Keap totally.
Allow’s walk through the horrible issues I ran into.
Protection Issues & Lots of Bugs
Given GoHighLevel positioned itself as an all-in-one automation platform, I made sure to meticulously recreate every workflow from my old Keap account.
These consisted of sequences for onboarding new email clients, onboarding new customers, automating follow-ups for webinar enrollments, sending out occasion suggestions, managing subscription expiries and a lot more.
Everything appeared to be working penalty … up until unexpectedly it had not been. One morning, I woke up to find 171 entirely irrelevant e-mails had been sent out to users who must NOT have actually gotten them. This occurred three days in a row, with a various batch of 160 individuals each day.
I desperately tried troubleshooting and rebuilding the automation from square one. Yet the trouble continued.
When I frantically connected to their assistance group, they vaguely claimed “web server problems” were at fault. But this explanation didn’t make any sense, because the errors continued occurring each morning like clockwork unrelated to any type of downtime.
In my mind, this substantial failing was totally undesirable and simply didn’t benefit my company. I have hundreds of get in touches with counting on my automated campaigns running smoothly.
So if GoHighLevel was going to be absolutely unreliable, exactly how could I leave mission-critical workflows and delicate client data to their modern technology?
The unintuitive interface just worsened these concerns …
Discouraging UX
Coming from Keap where every little thing was smooth and instinctive, GoHighLevel’s learning curve felt steep and challenging.
Easy tasks like editing and enhancing workflows included digging via food selection systems that were all over the place. Key settings were unexplainably spread in completely various sections. Relocating in between functions felt disjointed or complex.
I’ll inform you what I mean by discussing their funnel builder as an instance. There were 3 different settings panels to take care of overall, specific, and item setups. Yet for some insane reason, the web links to accessibility each of these core settings were expanded on contrary sides of the screen. What!?
As somebody who values clean, thoughtful layout, this seriously irritated me.
It reinforced that GoHighLevel still seemed like a work-in-progress as opposed to a polished item all set for prime-time use. Their concerns appeared concentrated on stuffing in every feature imaginable, with inadequate usability as an afterthought.
And talking features, I quickly understood the affordable price tag featured expensive compromises …
Misleading Pricing GoHighLevel Paulson Thomas
Among GoHighLevel’s largest marketing points is the inexpensive rate for access to a lot of features. But I promptly learned this affordable base price was deceptive.
They nickle-and-dimed users with erratic costs for core capability. Instantly my charge card declarations had unclear $10 fees from GoHighLevel occasionally.
As it turned out, you get billed whenever you send an e-mail via their servers. So for high volume individuals, this added up to thousands of bucks in unanticipated expenses.
Between these per-email fees and paying added for deliverability attachments like Mailgun, my “inexpensive” GoHighLevel membership ended up costing considerably MORE than my Keap plan.
The low price tag was tempting, yet just not practical in practice. This bait-and-switch left a bad taste in my mouth.
Email Rates Suffered
The last dealbreaker was seeing my meticulously supported email open rates plunge nearly over night after changing to GoHighLevel.
Previously, my target market involvement constantly hit 35-40% open prices in Keap month after month. Once I migrated their records over to GoHighLevel, efficiency tanked instantaneously to a worthless 9% open rate.
Regardless of how much I maximized my sending practices or attempted every fixing technique, I might hardly push open rates back right into the teenagers– still a 50%+ decrease from my previous benchmarks GoHighLevel Paulson Thomas.
Let me repeat: my exact same audience and emails instantly had terrible involvement. The only point I can believe that would be causing this was whatever was taking place behind the scenes at GoHighLevel. For an agency so depending on email marketing, this was a big deal.
In between the debilitating deliverability problems, hidden charges, broken features, and horrible interface, I had ultimately reached my limitation …
Why I Give up GoHighLevel after 37 Days
Just 45 days after migrating my firm to GoHighLevel, I knew I had actually made a massive mistake. The disadvantages drastically surpassed any kind of benefits.
No software application is excellent, but the large volume of problems was past appropriate.
At the end of the day, software application comes down to count on. If I can not trust it to manage crucial features capably or think a vendor has my benefits in mind, then it’s time to walk away– even after investing considerable time, money, and initiative migrating.
So I made the tough phone call to reverse training course and return back to Keap totally simply weeks after going done in on GoHighLevel. Let’s discover what I gained from this debacle.
Trick Takeaways: What I Learned From My GoHighLevel Mistake
My time with HighLevel can be summarized as a costly ill fortune. But in knowledge, it showed me a few crucial lessons:
- Adhere to what jobs. Do not upset what’s functioning unless something is definitively better across the board. Change brings danger.
- Veterinarian asserts completely. Marketing buzz around new software program typically covers bigger underlying flaws. Deep due diligence is essential.
- Select simplicity over features. Properly designed tools ought to make your job life easier, not extra complicated and messy.
- Transparency develops depend on. Nontransparent pricing, shady reseller terms, and finger-pointing to evade troubles ruins trust.
- Seek honest evaluations. Delighted support evaluates mean much less if excessive concerns imply poor overall usability.
- Perfection is difficult. No single remedy can flawlessly meet every distinct organization need. Locate the least-bad fit.
- Development over transformation. Incremental renovations usually surpass risky wholesale reinvention of what currently works fine.
Simply put, I learned to be more doubtful of “too great to be true” marketing cases and much less lured by the allure of glossy new things. The devices you utilize daily ought to earn depend on with openness and efficiency, not slick advertising.