As a firm proprietor for over a decade, I depend on software and automation to streamline procedures and provide outcomes. So when GoHighLevel emerged on the scene couple of years back, it certainly captured my focus GoHighLevel P&C Insurance Playbook.
The idea was enticing– an all-in-one client management platform with marketing, sales, and service devices integrated with each other. As an entrepreneur always looking to simplify and scale my service, it seemed like a dream happened theoretically. That wouldn’t desire a solitary solution that does it all?
Yet in this extensive GoHighLevel evaluation, I’ll take you inside my tragic trip of trying (and stopping working) to switch to this prominent new software. You’ll learn:
If you’re taking into consideration whether GoHighLevel is right for your own organization requirements, with any luck you can learn from my painful errors and inflated expectations.
Spoiler: I do NOT suggest GoHighLevel. If you need a CRM, begin with this list of ideal CRMs rather. I utilize Keap.
Some GoHighLevel Alternatives
If you’re seeking a sales, marketing, and task monitoring option to GoHighLevel, after that here are a couple of we advise.
Backstory: Why I Considered Switching Over from Keap
To recognize what attracted me to GoHighLevel in the first place, you require context regarding my previous configuration. For over 5 years I had actually been happily depending on Keap (previously Infusionsoft) to satisfy all my customer administration and automation requirements.
I discovered Keap instinctive to make use of and it dealt with every little thing I needed– CRM, email marketing, sales funnels, subscription websites, and client assistance.
Keap’s CRM and sales and marketing automation are made to aid local business maintain their clients while adding brand-new ones easily. Automate follow-ups with e-mails and messages, making sure leads and clients receive the ideal messages at the right time. Use web site and social networks types to improve lead follow-up, and manage your growth with easy consultation scheduling and lead monitoring. Boost sales with automated quoting, invoicing, and settlement processing, maximizing your time. With Keap, local business can save 10 hours per week and rise earnings by 39%. Begin with a 14-day free trial, no charge card required.
Why we like Keap
Keap provides a comprehensive customer connection management (CRM) and marketing automation solution tailored for small companies and business owners. We appreciate Keap’s focus on streamlining sales processes and supporting client relationships with effective automation tools. The platform’s all-in-one approach incorporates CRM, email marketing, invoicing, and job administration, making it especially attractive for companies aiming to settle their tech stack.
For the most part, it simply worked accurately with minimal fuss or upkeep called for. My open and click-through prices were terrific (like 35% terrific). Automations ran smoothly without issues.
So why on earth was I attracted to uproot my entire functional foundation from a system that functioned to attempt something unproven and untried?
In hindsight I can confess I got attracted by the siren telephone call of “glossy things disorder”. You know the feeling: when every person’s discussing a new tool that will certainly change your business … The lawn usually looks greener beyond, and I questioned whether GoHighLevel may reduce friction factors that I would certainly learned to tolerate over the years with Keap.
I resisted initially, however a couple of more irritations led me to think perhaps it was time for an adjustment.
The Financial investment: Moving My Firm to GoHighLevel
Earlier this year I made a decision to take the plunge. I enrolled in HighLevel’s Company plan at $297/month, spending considerably greater than the $97/month starter price.
This had not been a choice I took lightly. I knew switching over platforms was mosting likely to require moving all my Keap information and basically reconstructing my whole tech facilities from the ground up using every one of the GoHighLevel integrations readily available.
Below’s an introduction of just a few of the effort required:
- Manually exporting 20,000+ email customer documents
- Recreating loads of automations and workflows
- Moving customer profiles, notes, and job information to the new CRM
- Reconfiguring my Stripe invoicing integration
- Establishing landing pages, coupons, and sales funnels all over again
- Learning a totally international UX and interface design
Done in, I spent around 30-40 laborious hours of setup job transitioning whatever over– not to mention managing lost productivity during the switch.
However inevitably, it was a calculated financial investment I was willing to make. I figured some temporary discomfort would certainly settle with GoHighLevel giving a far better lasting option for my company, Dripify. Oh exactly how incorrect I was …
It only took me regarding a month of hands-on usage to realize I had made a huge blunder. The concerns started piling up quickly, up until it got to a factor I had to cut my losses and switch over back to Keap completely.
Allow’s walk through the nightmarish issues I encountered.
Security Issues & Several Bugs
Given GoHighLevel positioned itself as an all-in-one automation platform, I took care to thoroughly recreate each and every single workflow from my old Keap account.
These consisted of series for onboarding new email customers, onboarding brand-new customers, automating follow-ups for webinar registrations, sending out event suggestions, managing subscription expirations and far more.
Whatever appeared to be operating penalty … up until instantly it had not been. One early morning, I woke up to discover 171 totally unnecessary e-mails had actually been sent out to users who must NOT have actually received them. This occurred three days straight, with a different set of 160 individuals each day.
I frantically tried repairing and rebuilding the automation from square one. Yet the issue persisted.
When I frantically connected to their assistance group, they vaguely declared “server issues” were to blame. Yet this description didn’t make any type of sense, given that the errors proceeded taking place each early morning like clockwork unrelated to any kind of downtime.
In my mind, this huge failure was totally unacceptable and just really did not work for my service. I have countless get in touches with relying on my automated campaigns running efficiently.
So if GoHighLevel was going to be entirely unstable, how could I leave mission-critical workflows and delicate client data to their technology?
The unintuitive interface just intensified these concerns …
Irritating UX
Coming from Keap where whatever was seamless and user-friendly, GoHighLevel’s learning contour felt high and complex.
Straightforward jobs like editing and enhancing workflows included digging through menu systems that were all over the place. Trick settings were unexplainably spread in entirely various sections. Moving 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 setups panels to handle overall, individual, and item arrangements. Yet for some crazy factor, the links to gain access to each of these core settings were expanded on opposite sides of the screen. What!?
As somebody who values clean, thoughtful style, this seriously frustrated me.
It strengthened that GoHighLevel still felt like a work-in-progress instead of a refined product prepared for prime-time usage. Their priorities appeared concentrated on packing in every feature imaginable, with bad functionality as a second thought.
And speaking of features, I soon realized the small cost tag included costly compromises …
Deceptive Pricing GoHighLevel P&C Insurance Playbook
Among GoHighLevel’s most significant marketing factors is the budget-friendly rate for accessibility to a lot of features. However I quickly discovered this affordable base price was deceptive.
They nickle-and-dimed customers with occasional fees for core performance. Instantly my credit card statements had unclear $10 costs from GoHighLevel here and there.
As it turned out, you obtain charged each time you send out an e-mail with their servers. So for high volume customers, this amounted to thousands of bucks in unforeseen costs.
Between these per-email charges and paying additional for deliverability add-ons like Mailgun, my “cost effective” GoHighLevel subscription wound up costing significantly greater than my Keap plan.
The low sticker price was appealing, but simply not reasonable in practice. This bait-and-switch left a bad taste in my mouth.
Email Fees Suffered
The last dealbreaker was seeing my thoroughly supported email open prices plummet virtually overnight after changing to GoHighLevel.
Formerly, my audience engagement continually struck 35-40% open rates in Keap month after month. Once I moved their records over to GoHighLevel, performance tanked promptly to a worthless 9% open rate.
Despite just how much I enhanced my sending techniques or tried every troubleshooting technique, I can barely push open rates back right into the teenagers– still a 50%+ decrease from my previous benchmarks GoHighLevel P&C Insurance Playbook.
Let me repeat: my exact same audience and emails unexpectedly had dreadful involvement. The only thing I could assume that would be causing this was whatever was occurring behind the scenes at GoHighLevel. For a company so dependent on e-mail marketing, this was a big deal.
Between the crippling deliverability concerns, hidden charges, broken features, and dreadful interface, I had finally reached my limit …
Why I Quit GoHighLevel after 37 Days
Simply 45 days after migrating my firm to GoHighLevel, I recognized I had made a significant mistake. The cons significantly exceeded any type of advantages.
No software is ideal, however the sheer volume of issues was beyond appropriate.
At the end of the day, software application comes down to trust fund. If I can not trust it to take care of crucial features competently or think a vendor has my benefits in mind, then it’s time to walk away– also after spending substantial time, cash, and effort moving.
So I made the difficult contact us to turn around training course and return back to Keap entirely simply weeks after going done in on GoHighLevel. Let’s discover what I picked up from this debacle.
Key Takeaways: What I Gained from My GoHighLevel Error
My time with HighLevel can be summed up as an expensive accident. Yet in knowledge, it showed me a few essential lessons:
- Stick to what jobs. Don’t disturb what’s working unless something is definitively far better across the board. Modification brings threat.
- Veterinarian asserts completely. Marketing buzz around new software typically covers larger underlying problems. Deep due diligence is important.
- Choose simplicity over features. Well-designed tools need to make your work life much easier, not more complex and messy.
- Openness constructs trust. Opaque pricing, questionable reseller terms, and finger-pointing to escape troubles destroys trust.
- Look for unbiased testimonials. Delighted assistance reviews indicate less if excessive issues indicate inadequate overall functionality.
- Perfection is difficult. No solitary service can flawlessly satisfy every unique organization requirement. Find the least-bad fit.
- Evolution over change. Incremental improvements typically exceed high-risk wholesale reinvention of what currently functions fine.
In other words, I discovered to be extra hesitant of “also great to be real” marketing claims and less lured by the attraction of glossy brand-new objects. The devices you utilize daily should make count on via openness and efficiency, not slick advertising.