As a firm owner for over a years, I count on software application and automation to streamline procedures and provide results. So when GoHighLevel arised on the scene few years back, it certainly captured my focus GoHighLevel Phone Integration.
The idea was enticing– an all-in-one customer administration system with marketing, sales, and solution tools incorporated together. As an entrepreneur always aiming to streamline and scale my organization, it looked like a desire come true on paper. That would not want a solitary solution that does it all?
Yet in this thorough GoHighLevel testimonial, I’ll take you inside my tragic trip of attempting (and failing) to switch over to this popular brand-new software application. You’ll learn:
If you’re thinking about whether GoHighLevel is right for your own business needs, with any luck you can learn from my unpleasant blunders and pumped up expectations.
Spoiler: I do NOT suggest GoHighLevel. If you require a CRM, begin with this list of best CRMs instead. I use Keap.
Some GoHighLevel Alternatives
If you’re searching for a sales, marketing, and task management alternative to GoHighLevel, after that right here are a couple of we suggest.
Backstory: Why I Thought About Changing from Keap
To understand what attracted me to GoHighLevel to begin with, you require context regarding my previous arrangement. For over 5 years I had been happily depending on Keap (previously Infusionsoft) to satisfy all my client monitoring and automation requirements.
I discovered Keap user-friendly to use and it handled every little thing I needed– CRM, email marketing, sales funnels, subscription websites, and client assistance.
Keap’s CRM and sales and marketing automation are designed to assist small businesses keep their clients while adding new ones easily. Automate follow-ups with e-mails and texts, making sure leads and clients receive the ideal messages at the correct time. Usage web site and social networks kinds to enhance lead follow-up, and handle your growth with simple consultation organizing and lead monitoring. Boost sales with automated pricing estimate, invoicing, and payment handling, liberating your time. With Keap, small companies can conserve 10 hours weekly and rise profits by 39%. Beginning with a 14-day free trial, no bank card required.
Why we like Keap
Keap supplies a thorough customer connection monitoring (CRM) and marketing automation option tailored for small businesses and entrepreneurs. We value Keap’s focus on improving sales procedures and supporting client partnerships via powerful automation tools. The platform’s all-in-one approach combines CRM, e-mail marketing, invoicing, and job management, making it particularly appealing for organizations wanting to consolidate their technology pile.
For the most part, it simply functioned dependably with marginal hassle or maintenance needed. My open and click-through prices were fantastic (like 35% wonderful). Automations ran efficiently without any concerns.
So why on earth was I tempted to uproot my whole functional foundation from a system that worked to attempt something unverified and untested?
In hindsight I can admit I got seduced by the alarm call of “shiny object syndrome”. You understand the feeling: when everybody’s discussing a new tool that will change your organization … The turf frequently looks greener on the other side, and I asked yourself whether GoHighLevel might minimize rubbing points that I ‘d learned to endure throughout the years with Keap.
I withstood initially, but a couple of even more irritations led me to assume perhaps it was time for a change.
The Financial investment: Moving My Company to GoHighLevel
Previously this year I determined to start. I signed up for HighLevel’s Agency plan at $297/month, spending substantially more than the $97/month starter cost.
This wasn’t a choice I took lightly. I knew switching over platforms was going to need migrating all my Keap data and essentially restoring my whole technology framework from scratch making use of all of the GoHighLevel integrations available.
Here’s a summary of just a few of the initiative needed:
- By hand exporting 20,000+ email customer records
- Recreating loads of automations and workflows
- Moving client profiles, notes, and job data to the brand-new CRM
- Reconfiguring my Stripe invoicing integration
- Establishing landing pages, discounts, and sales funnels all over again
- Learning a totally international UX and interface style
All in, I spent around 30-40 laborious hours of configuration job transitioning every little thing over– not to mention taking care of shed productivity during the button.
However ultimately, it was a computed financial investment I was willing to make. I figured some temporary discomfort would repay with GoHighLevel providing a better long-term remedy for my service, Dripify. Oh exactly how wrong I was …
It just took me regarding a month of hands-on use to realize I had actually made a large error. The issues started piling up swiftly, till it got to a point I had to reduce my losses and switch over back to Keap completely.
Allow’s go through the horrible troubles I experienced.
Safety Issues & Many Vermin
Offered GoHighLevel placed itself as an all-in-one automation system, I made sure to diligently recreate every single workflow from my old Keap account.
These included sequences for onboarding brand-new email customers, onboarding new customers, automating follow-ups for webinar registrations, sending event reminders, managing subscription expirations and much more.
Whatever appeared to be functioning fine … up until suddenly it wasn’t. One early morning, I awoke to discover 171 totally unimportant e-mails had been sent to customers that ought to NOT have actually gotten them. This occurred 3 days straight, with a different set of 160 individuals each day.
I desperately attempted fixing and rebuilding the automation from scratch. However the trouble persisted.
When I frantically reached out to their support team, they vaguely claimed “server problems” were to blame. However this description didn’t make any kind of sense, since the errors continued happening each early morning like clockwork unassociated to any kind of downtime.
In my mind, this large failure was entirely unacceptable and just didn’t help my company. I have thousands of calls relying upon my automated campaigns running smoothly.
So if GoHighLevel was mosting likely to be completely unstable, exactly how could I entrust mission-critical workflows and sensitive customer data to their technology?
The unintuitive interface just intensified these issues …
Discouraging UX
Coming from Keap where whatever was seamless and intuitive, GoHighLevel’s learning contour felt steep and complex.
Easy tasks like editing workflows involved digging with menu systems that were all over the place. Secret setups were unexplainably spread in completely different sections. Moving in between features really felt disjointed or confusing.
I’ll tell you what I suggest by talking about their funnel builder as an instance. There were 3 separate setups panels to take care of overall, individual, and product arrangements. Yet for some insane factor, the web links to gain access to each of these core setups were expanded on opposite sides of the screen. What!?
As a person who values tidy, thoughtful style, this seriously upset me.
It strengthened that GoHighLevel still seemed like a work-in-progress rather than a refined item prepared for prime-time use. Their top priorities appeared focused on stuffing in every feature under the sun, with poor use as a second thought.
And talking features, I soon recognized the low cost tag included expensive concessions …
Misleading Pricing GoHighLevel Phone Integration
Among GoHighLevel’s biggest selling points is the inexpensive price for access to so many features. But I rapidly learned this affordable base expense was deceptive.
They nickle-and-dimed users with sporadic fees for core performance. Suddenly my charge card statements had obscure $10 costs from GoHighLevel occasionally.
As it turned out, you obtain charged whenever you send an e-mail through their web servers. So for high volume users, this amounted to numerous dollars in unexpected costs.
Between these per-email charges and paying added for deliverability add-ons like Mailgun, my “budget-friendly” GoHighLevel registration wound up setting you back significantly greater than my Keap plan.
The reduced sticker price was tempting, however just not reasonable in practice. This bait-and-switch left a negative taste in my mouth.
Email Rates Suffered
The final dealbreaker was seeing my carefully supported e-mail open prices plunge nearly overnight after changing to GoHighLevel.
Previously, my target market engagement constantly hit 35-40% open rates in Keap month after month. Once I moved their documents over to GoHighLevel, efficiency tanked instantly to a pathetic 9% open price.
Despite just how much I optimized my sending methods or tried every repairing method, I could hardly push open prices back right into the teens– still a 50%+ decline from my previous criteria GoHighLevel Phone Integration.
Let me repeat: my exact same target market and e-mails all of a sudden had terrible involvement. The only point I might assume that would be causing this was whatever was occurring behind the scenes at GoHighLevel. For a firm so depending on e-mail marketing, this was a big deal.
In between the debilitating deliverability problems, concealed fees, busted features, and awful interface, I had ultimately reached my restriction …
Why I Give up GoHighLevel after 37 Days
Simply 45 days after moving my agency to GoHighLevel, I understood I had actually made a huge error. The cons dramatically exceeded any benefits.
No software program is excellent, but the sheer quantity of troubles was past appropriate.
At the end of the day, software program comes down to trust fund. If I can’t trust it to deal with critical features effectively or believe a vendor has my best interests in mind, after that it’s time to walk away– also after investing considerable time, money, and initiative migrating.
So I made the tough contact us to reverse training course and return back to Keap entirely simply weeks after going done in on GoHighLevel. Let’s explore what I gained from this ordeal.
Key Takeaways: What I Picked up from My GoHighLevel Error
My time with HighLevel can be summarized as a pricey accident. But in knowledge, it showed me a couple of essential lessons:
- Stick to what jobs. Do not upset what’s functioning unless something is definitively far better across the board. Change brings danger.
- Vet asserts extensively. Marketing hype around brand-new software application often covers larger underlying problems. Deep due persistance is vital.
- Select simpleness over features. Properly designed devices need to make your job life less complicated, not extra complicated and unpleasant.
- Openness builds depend on. Nontransparent pricing, dubious reseller terms, and finger-pointing to escape problems ruins trust.
- Seek honest reviews. Pleased assistance reviews indicate much less if too much problems indicate poor overall usability.
- Excellence is impossible. No solitary solution can completely fulfill every distinct organization need. Discover the least-bad fit.
- Advancement over transformation. Incremental enhancements usually exceed dangerous wholesale reinvention of what already works penalty.
Basically, I discovered to be more hesitant of “also good to be real” marketing insurance claims and less tempted by the appeal of glossy new objects. The devices you utilize daily must gain trust fund through transparency and performance, not glossy advertising.