As a firm owner for over a years, I rely on software program and automation to improve operations and provide outcomes. So when GoHighLevel arised on the scene few years back, it definitely caught my attention GoHighLevel Phone System.
The idea was enticing– an all-in-one client administration platform with marketing, sales, and service tools incorporated together. As an entrepreneur always wanting to streamline and scale my organization, it felt like a desire come to life on paper. Who wouldn’t want a solitary solution that does it all?
However in this thorough GoHighLevel testimonial, I’ll take you inside my dreadful journey of attempting (and falling short) to switch over to this popular brand-new software application. You’ll find out:
If you’re considering whether GoHighLevel is right for your own organization needs, ideally you can gain from my excruciating mistakes and pumped up expectations.
Spoiler: I do NOT advise GoHighLevel. If you require a CRM, start with this checklist of ideal CRMs rather. I use Keap.
Some GoHighLevel Alternatives
If you’re seeking a sales, marketing, and job monitoring choice to GoHighLevel, after that here are a couple of we suggest.
Backstory: Why I Thought About Changing from Keap
To comprehend what attracted me to GoHighLevel in the first place, you require context concerning my previous setup. For over 5 years I had actually been happily relying on Keap (previously Infusionsoft) to satisfy all my customer monitoring and automation demands.
I discovered Keap user-friendly to use and it dealt with whatever I required– CRM, e-mail marketing, sales funnels, subscription sites, and customer support.
Keap’s CRM and sales and marketing automation are designed to aid local business maintain their customers while adding new ones effortlessly. Automate follow-ups with e-mails and texts, guaranteeing leads and customers obtain the ideal messages at the correct time. Usage site and social media kinds to simplify lead follow-up, and handle your growth with very easy consultation scheduling and lead monitoring. Boost sales with automated estimating, invoicing, and settlement handling, liberating 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 called for.
Why we like Keap
Keap supplies an extensive client relationship management (CRM) and marketing automation solution tailored for local business and entrepreneurs. We value Keap’s focus on enhancing sales procedures and supporting customer relationships with powerful automation devices. The system’s all-in-one technique integrates CRM, email marketing, invoicing, and job monitoring, making it specifically attractive for companies aiming to consolidate their tech stack.
Generally, it just functioned dependably with very little hassle or upkeep called for. My open and click-through prices were great (like 35% wonderful). Automations ran efficiently without any problems.
So why in the world was I lured to uproot my entire functional foundation from a system that functioned to try something unverified and untried?
In hindsight I can admit I obtained seduced by the alarm phone call of “shiny things disorder”. You recognize the feeling: when every person’s discussing a new tool that will change your organization … The turf commonly looks greener on the other side, and I wondered whether GoHighLevel could minimize friction factors that I would certainly discovered to tolerate over the years with Keap.
I stood up to at first, however a couple of more aggravations led me to assume maybe it was time for a change.
The Financial investment: Migrating My Company to GoHighLevel
Earlier this year I made a decision to take the plunge. I enrolled in HighLevel’s Agency plan at $297/month, spending significantly greater than the $97/month starter cost.
This had not been a decision I ignored. I recognized switching platforms was going to call for moving all my Keap information and basically reconstructing my whole tech infrastructure from the ground up utilizing all of the GoHighLevel integrations available.
Below’s an introduction of simply several of the effort called for:
- Manually exporting 20,000+ email subscriber records
- Recreating loads of automations and workflows
- Relocating client profiles, notes, and project data to the new CRM
- Reconfiguring my Stripe billing integration
- Setting up landing pages, coupons, and sales funnels throughout once more
- Learning a totally foreign UX and interface style
All in, I invested around 30-40 tiresome hours of arrangement job transitioning every little thing over– in addition to taking care of lost efficiency during the switch.
But inevitably, it was a computed financial investment I was willing to make. I figured some temporary discomfort would certainly pay off with GoHighLevel providing a better long-term solution for my service, Dripify. Oh exactly how incorrect I was …
It just took me regarding a month of hands-on use to recognize I had made a large error. The concerns began accumulating swiftly, up until it got to a factor I had to cut my losses and switch back to Keap totally.
Let’s go through the horrible issues I ran into.
Security Issues & Many Vermin
Given GoHighLevel placed itself as an all-in-one automation platform, I made sure to meticulously recreate every workflow from my old Keap account.
These consisted of series for onboarding brand-new e-mail clients, onboarding new clients, automating follow-ups for webinar registrations, sending out occasion tips, managing membership expiries and a lot more.
Whatever appeared to be working fine … till suddenly it wasn’t. One early morning, I awoke to discover 171 entirely unimportant e-mails had actually been sent out to users who should NOT have actually gotten them. This happened three days in a row, with a various set of 160 people each day.
I hysterically tried fixing and rebuilding the automation from the ground up. But the trouble continued.
When I frantically connected to their assistance team, they slightly asserted “server problems” were responsible. However this description didn’t make any type of sense, considering that the errors proceeded taking place each morning like clockwork unassociated to any type of downtime.
In my mind, this enormous failing was entirely inappropriate and simply really did not help my organization. I have hundreds of get in touches with depending on my automated campaigns running efficiently.
So if GoHighLevel was going to be completely unreliable, how could I leave mission-critical workflows and delicate customer data to their modern technology?
The unintuitive user interface just worsened these issues …
Frustrating UX
Coming from Keap where whatever was seamless and user-friendly, GoHighLevel’s learning contour really felt high and complex.
Easy jobs like modifying workflows involved digging with menu systems that were all over the place. Trick settings were unexplainably scattered in totally different sections. Relocating between functions felt disjointed or complicated.
I’ll inform you what I mean by discussing their funnel builder as an instance. There were 3 different setups panels to manage overall, individual, and item configurations. Yet for some crazy factor, the links to gain access to each of these core setups were spread out on opposite sides of the screen. What!?
As a person that values tidy, thoughtful layout, this seriously irritated me.
It reinforced that GoHighLevel still seemed like a work-in-progress rather than a sleek product all set for prime-time use. Their top priorities seemed focused on cramming in every feature imaginable, with inadequate use as a second thought.
And talking features, I quickly realized the small cost tag came with expensive concessions …
Misleading Pricing GoHighLevel Phone System
Among GoHighLevel’s largest marketing factors is the budget-friendly cost for access to a lot of features. However I promptly learned this low-cost base cost was misleading.
They nickle-and-dimed users with occasional charges for core capability. Unexpectedly my credit card statements had obscure $10 costs from GoHighLevel occasionally.
As it turned out, you obtain billed every time you send out an e-mail through their servers. So for high quantity individuals, this added up to hundreds of dollars in unforeseen expenses.
Between these per-email fees and paying extra for deliverability add-ons like Mailgun, my “economical” GoHighLevel registration wound up setting you back substantially greater than my Keap plan.
The reduced sticker price was tempting, but just not sensible in practice. This bait-and-switch left a poor preference in my mouth.
Email Fees Suffered
The last dealbreaker was seeing my meticulously nurtured email open rates drop practically overnight after switching to GoHighLevel.
Formerly, my audience involvement continually struck 35-40% open prices in Keap month after month. But once I moved their documents over to GoHighLevel, efficiency tanked promptly to a pathetic 9% open price.
Despite how much I maximized my sending practices or attempted every fixing technique, I can hardly nudge open rates back right into the teens– still a 50%+ decrease from my previous standards GoHighLevel Phone System.
Let me repeat: my exact same target market and emails unexpectedly had terrible interaction. The only point I could assume that would certainly be triggering this was whatever was occurring behind the scenes at GoHighLevel. For a firm so dependent on email marketing, this was a big deal.
In between the debilitating deliverability problems, hidden charges, busted features, and horrible interface, I had ultimately reached my limit …
Why I Stop GoHighLevel after 37 Days
Just 45 days after migrating my company to GoHighLevel, I knew I had actually made a huge blunder. The disadvantages considerably surpassed any advantages.
No software is best, yet the large volume of issues was beyond acceptable.
At the end of the day, software program boils down to trust fund. If I can not trust it to handle vital functions competently or think a vendor has my best interests in mind, after that it’s time to leave– even after spending considerable time, money, and initiative moving.
So I made the tough phone call to reverse course and return back to Keap entirely simply weeks after going done in on GoHighLevel. Allow’s discover what I learned from this fiasco.
Trick Takeaways: What I Picked up from My GoHighLevel Mistake
My time with HighLevel can be summed up as a costly accident. However in knowledge, it educated me a few crucial lessons:
- Adhere to what jobs. Don’t upset what’s working unless something is definitively much better across the board. Change brings danger.
- Veterinarian claims completely. Marketing buzz around new software usually covers larger underlying flaws. Deep due persistance is essential.
- Select simpleness over features. Properly designed tools should make your work life easier, not extra complex and unpleasant.
- Transparency builds trust fund. Nontransparent pricing, dubious reseller terms, and finger-pointing to evade problems destroys depend on.
- Look for impartial reviews. Delighted assistance reviews indicate less if too much concerns suggest poor overall use.
- Perfection is impossible. No single option can flawlessly satisfy every unique organization requirement. Discover the least-bad fit.
- Evolution over revolution. Incremental improvements usually exceed dangerous wholesale reinvention of what currently works penalty.
In other words, I discovered to be extra unconvinced of “as well excellent to be real” marketing insurance claims and less lured by the attraction of shiny brand-new things. The devices you make use of daily should earn count on through transparency and efficiency, not slick advertising.