As an agency proprietor for over a decade, I depend on software and automation to enhance procedures and supply outcomes. So when GoHighLevel emerged on the scene few years back, it absolutely caught my attention GoHighLevel PeakEquity Partners.
The idea was enticing– an all-in-one customer monitoring system with marketing, sales, and service tools incorporated together. As a business owner always wanting to streamline and scale my company, it appeared like a dream happened theoretically. Who would not desire a single service that does it all?
Yet in this extensive GoHighLevel evaluation, I’ll take you inside my dreadful trip of attempting (and failing) to change to this popular new software application. You’ll find out:
If you’re taking into consideration whether GoHighLevel is right for your own business demands, hopefully you can pick up from my excruciating mistakes and inflated expectations.
Looter: I do NOT recommend GoHighLevel. If you require a CRM, begin with this listing of best CRMs rather. I utilize Keap.
Some GoHighLevel Alternatives
If you’re seeking a sales, marketing, and task monitoring option to GoHighLevel, then right here are a couple of we advise.
Backstory: Why I Considered Switching Over from Keap
To recognize what attracted me to GoHighLevel to begin with, you need context about my previous setup. For over 5 years I had been gladly relying upon Keap (previously Infusionsoft) to meet all my customer administration and automation requirements.
I located Keap instinctive to utilize and it managed whatever I needed– CRM, e-mail marketing, sales funnels, membership sites, and customer support.
Keap’s CRM and sales and marketing automation are developed to help local business maintain their customers while adding brand-new ones easily. Automate follow-ups with emails and texts, making certain leads and customers get the appropriate messages at the correct time. Usage web site and social media types to streamline lead follow-up, and handle your development with simple appointment organizing and lead monitoring. Boost sales with automated pricing quote, invoicing, and settlement processing, maximizing your time. With Keap, small businesses can conserve 10 hours each week and increase earnings by 39%. Begin with a 14-day free trial, no charge card required.
Why we like Keap
Keap provides a detailed customer connection management (CRM) and marketing automation option customized for local business and entrepreneurs. We value Keap’s focus on enhancing sales procedures and supporting customer partnerships via effective automation tools. The platform’s all-in-one approach incorporates CRM, email marketing, invoicing, and task monitoring, making it especially eye-catching for organizations seeking to combine their technology stack.
For the most part, it just worked reliably with minimal hassle or maintenance called for. My open and click-through rates were fantastic (like 35% great). Automations ran smoothly with no problems.
So why on earth was I tempted to uproot my entire functional structure from a system that functioned to attempt something unproven and untried?
In knowledge I can confess I obtained attracted by the alarm call of “shiny object syndrome”. You understand the sensation: when everybody’s discussing a new tool that will certainly reinvent your organization … The turf frequently looks greener on the other side, and I asked yourself whether GoHighLevel might decrease friction points that I ‘d learned to endure over the years with Keap.
I stood up to at first, yet a couple of more stress led me to believe maybe it was time for a modification.
The Investment: Migrating My Firm to GoHighLevel
Earlier this year I made a decision to take the plunge. I registered for HighLevel’s Company plan at $297/month, investing significantly more than the $97/month starter expense.
This wasn’t a decision I took lightly. I recognized changing platforms was going to call for moving all my Keap information and essentially rebuilding my whole technology facilities from the ground up making use of every one of the GoHighLevel integrations readily available.
Here’s a review of simply some of the initiative called for:
- By hand exporting 20,000+ e-mail client records
- Recreating dozens of automations and workflows
- Relocating client accounts, notes, and job data to the brand-new CRM
- Reconfiguring my Stripe invoicing integration
- Establishing landing pages, promos, and sales funnels all over again
- Learning a totally international UX and user interface style
All in, I spent around 30-40 tedious hours of setup work transitioning everything over– and also dealing with lost productivity throughout the switch.
But eventually, it was a calculated financial investment I wanted to make. I figured some temporary pain would certainly settle with GoHighLevel offering a far better lasting option for my service, Dripify. Oh just how incorrect I was …
It only took me regarding a month of hands-on use to realize I had made a huge blunder. The issues began accumulating swiftly, till it got to a point I had to reduce my losses and switch back to Keap totally.
Let’s go through the nightmarish problems I experienced.
Safety And Security Issues & Many Vermin
Given GoHighLevel placed itself as an all-in-one automation platform, I made sure to carefully recreate every single workflow from my old Keap account.
These consisted of sequences for onboarding brand-new e-mail customers, onboarding new customers, automating follow-ups for webinar registrations, sending out occasion pointers, taking care of membership expiries and much more.
Every little thing seemed to be working fine … till unexpectedly it had not been. One early morning, I woke up to discover 171 totally unnecessary emails had actually been sent to customers who should NOT have actually received them. This took place three days in a row, with a various set of 160 individuals every day.
I anxiously attempted troubleshooting and restoring the automation from square one. Yet the trouble persisted.
When I desperately reached out to their assistance group, they vaguely asserted “web server problems” were at fault. However this explanation really did not make any type of sense, considering that the errors continued happening each early morning like clockwork unassociated to any downtime.
In my mind, this massive failure was completely undesirable and simply didn’t help my service. I have hundreds of calls counting on my automated campaigns running smoothly.
So if GoHighLevel was going to be completely unreliable, how could I leave mission-critical workflows and sensitive customer information to their technology?
The unintuitive interface only worsened these issues …
Discouraging UX
Coming from Keap where everything was smooth and intuitive, GoHighLevel’s learning curve really felt steep and complex.
Basic tasks like editing workflows included digging with food selection systems that were all over the place. Trick settings were unexplainably spread in entirely different areas. Relocating in between features really felt disjointed or complicated.
I’ll tell you what I suggest by discussing their funnel builder as an instance. There were 3 separate setups panels to take care of overall, specific, and product setups. Yet for some insane factor, the web links to access each of these core setups were expanded on opposite sides of the display. What!?
As someone that values clean, thoughtful design, this seriously upset me.
It enhanced that GoHighLevel still felt like a work-in-progress as opposed to a refined item prepared for prime-time usage. Their priorities seemed focused on cramming in every feature under the sun, with bad functionality as an afterthought.
And speaking of features, I soon realized the low cost tag featured expensive concessions …
Deceptive Pricing GoHighLevel PeakEquity Partners
One of GoHighLevel’s biggest marketing factors is the economical cost for access to a lot of features. Yet I swiftly discovered this economical base price was misleading.
They nickle-and-dimed users with erratic costs for core functionality. All of a sudden my charge card statements had unclear $10 costs from GoHighLevel occasionally.
As it turned out, you obtain billed every single time you send an e-mail via their servers. So for high volume customers, this added up to hundreds of dollars in unexpected prices.
In between these per-email charges and paying extra for deliverability add-ons like Mailgun, my “economical” GoHighLevel membership ended up costing substantially MORE than my Keap plan.
The low sticker price was alluring, but simply not realistic in practice. This bait-and-switch left a poor preference in my mouth.
Email Fees Suffered
The last dealbreaker was seeing my meticulously supported email open rates drop practically over night after changing to GoHighLevel.
Previously, my audience interaction regularly hit 35-40% open rates in Keap month after month. Once I moved their documents over to GoHighLevel, performance tanked quickly to a worthless 9% open rate.
No matter just how much I optimized my sending out methods or tried every troubleshooting method, I can hardly push open prices back right into the teens– still a 50%+ decline from my previous criteria GoHighLevel PeakEquity Partners.
Let me repeat: my exact same target market and emails instantly had dreadful engagement. The only thing I might assume that would certainly be creating this was whatever was happening behind the scenes at GoHighLevel. For a company so depending on email marketing, this was a big deal.
In between the crippling deliverability concerns, concealed fees, busted features, and horrible interface, I had ultimately reached my restriction …
Why I Quit GoHighLevel after 37 Days
Simply 45 days after moving my company to GoHighLevel, I understood I had actually made a big blunder. The disadvantages significantly exceeded any kind of benefits.
No software application is excellent, however the large quantity of problems was past acceptable.
At the end of the day, software application comes down to trust fund. If I can’t trust it to handle vital features competently or believe a vendor has my best interests in mind, then it’s time to leave– also after investing considerable time, cash, and effort migrating.
So I made the hard contact us to reverse training course and return back to Keap completely simply weeks after going all in on GoHighLevel. Let’s explore what I learned from this debacle.
Key Takeaways: What I Gained from My GoHighLevel Error
My time with HighLevel can be summed up as a costly accident. But in knowledge, it instructed me a few essential lessons:
- Stay with what jobs. Do not upset what’s working unless something is definitively far better across the board. Modification brings risk.
- Veterinarian declares thoroughly. Marketing buzz around brand-new software often obscures bigger underlying defects. Deep due persistance is important.
- Pick simplicity over features. Properly designed tools should make your work life simpler, not much more challenging and unpleasant.
- Openness develops depend on. Opaque pricing, shady reseller terms, and finger-pointing to evade problems destroys trust fund.
- Look for unbiased evaluations. Happy assistance examines imply less if excessive concerns imply poor overall use.
- Perfection is impossible. No solitary service can completely fulfill every one-of-a-kind service demand. Discover the least-bad fit.
- Evolution over change. Incremental improvements normally exceed risky wholesale reinvention of what already works fine.
Basically, I found out to be extra skeptical of “also good to be real” marketing cases and less attracted by the appeal of shiny new items. The tools you use daily must earn depend on with openness and efficiency, not glossy advertising.