As a company owner for over a decade, I depend on software program and automation to streamline procedures and supply results. So when GoHighLevel emerged on the scene few years back, it certainly caught my attention GoHighLevel Point-of-Sale.
The idea was attractive– an all-in-one customer management platform with marketing, sales, and service tools incorporated together. As a business owner constantly seeking to streamline and scale my organization, it looked like a dream come true theoretically. Who would not want a single solution that does it all?
But in this extensive GoHighLevel testimonial, I’ll take you inside my devastating journey of attempting (and stopping working) to switch to this popular brand-new software. You’ll discover:
If you’re taking into consideration whether GoHighLevel is right for your very own business requirements, with any luck you can learn from my painful errors and inflated assumptions.
Looter: I do NOT suggest GoHighLevel. If you need a CRM, start with this listing of ideal CRMs instead. I use Keap.
Some GoHighLevel Alternatives
If you’re seeking a sales, marketing, and project management choice to GoHighLevel, then here are a few we suggest.
Backstory: Why I Considered Switching from Keap
To comprehend what attracted me to GoHighLevel to begin with, you require context concerning my previous configuration. For over 5 years I had been gladly relying on Keap (previously Infusionsoft) to fulfill all my client management and automation needs.
I located Keap user-friendly to make use of and it handled whatever I required– CRM, e-mail marketing, sales funnels, membership sites, and client assistance.
Keap’s CRM and sales and marketing automation are designed to aid small businesses keep their customers while including new ones effortlessly. Automate follow-ups with e-mails and texts, ensuring leads and customers receive the best messages at the right time. Usage internet site and social networks kinds to enhance lead follow-up, and manage your growth with easy consultation scheduling and lead monitoring. Boost sales with automated quoting, invoicing, and repayment handling, liberating your time. With Keap, small businesses can conserve 10 hours per week and rise profits by 39%. Begin with a 14-day free trial, no charge card needed.
Why we like Keap
Keap supplies a comprehensive consumer connection monitoring (CRM) and marketing automation solution tailored for small businesses and business owners. We appreciate Keap’s focus on streamlining sales processes and nurturing customer connections via powerful automation devices. The platform’s all-in-one strategy incorporates CRM, email marketing, invoicing, and job monitoring, making it especially attractive for organizations seeking to consolidate their tech stack.
For the most part, it simply worked reliably with minimal fuss or upkeep called for. My open and click-through rates were fantastic (like 35% wonderful). Automations ran smoothly without any issues.
So why in the world was I tempted to uproot my entire operational structure from a system that worked to try something unverified and untested?
In hindsight I can admit I got seduced by the siren call of “shiny item disorder”. You know the sensation: when every person’s talking about a brand-new tool that will revolutionize your service … The yard usually looks greener on the other side, and I questioned whether GoHighLevel could reduce rubbing factors that I ‘d learned to tolerate throughout the years with Keap.
I resisted at first, however a couple of more frustrations led me to think possibly it was time for a change.
The Financial investment: Migrating My Agency to GoHighLevel
Earlier this year I decided to take the plunge. I registered for HighLevel’s Firm plan at $297/month, spending significantly greater than the $97/month starter expense.
This had not been a choice I ignored. I recognized switching platforms was mosting likely to require migrating all my Keap data and essentially reconstructing my entire tech infrastructure from scratch making use of all of the GoHighLevel integrations offered.
Here’s an introduction of just several of the effort needed:
- Manually exporting 20,000+ email subscriber records
- Recreating loads of automations and workflows
- Relocating customer accounts, notes, and task information to the brand-new CRM
- Reconfiguring my Stripe payment integration
- Setting up landing pages, coupons, and sales funnels all over once again
- Learning a completely foreign UX and user interface style
All in, I invested around 30-40 tedious hours of configuration job transitioning every little thing over– and also dealing with shed efficiency throughout the switch.
But eventually, it was a computed investment I was willing to make. I figured some temporary pain would certainly repay with GoHighLevel giving a better long-lasting option for my organization, Dripify. Oh how incorrect I was …
It only took me about a month of hands-on usage to recognize I had actually made a huge blunder. The concerns began accumulating promptly, up until it reached a factor I had to reduce my losses and change back to Keap entirely.
Let’s go through the horrible troubles I came across.
Security Issues & Lots of Bugs
Provided GoHighLevel placed itself as an all-in-one automation system, I made sure to diligently recreate every workflow from my old Keap account.
These consisted of sequences for onboarding new e-mail clients, onboarding brand-new clients, automating follow-ups for webinar enrollments, sending occasion pointers, handling membership expirations and a lot more.
Every little thing appeared to be functioning fine … till all of a sudden it had not been. One morning, I woke up to discover 171 totally irrelevant emails had been sent to customers that need to NOT have gotten them. This took place 3 days in a row, with a various set of 160 people daily.
I anxiously attempted fixing and rebuilding the automation from scratch. But the problem lingered.
When I frantically connected to their support group, they vaguely claimed “server issues” were at fault. Yet this explanation really did not make any kind of feeling, since the mistakes continued happening each early morning like clockwork unrelated to any downtime.
In my mind, this huge failing was totally inappropriate and just didn’t work for my company. I have hundreds of get in touches with relying on my automated campaigns running smoothly.
So if GoHighLevel was mosting likely to be completely undependable, how could I delegate mission-critical workflows and sensitive client data to their technology?
The unintuitive user interface only compounded these problems …
Frustrating UX
Coming from Keap where whatever was seamless and intuitive, GoHighLevel’s learning curve felt steep and complex.
Straightforward tasks like editing and enhancing workflows included excavating through food selection systems that were all over the place. Trick setups were unexplainably scattered in completely various sections. Relocating between features felt disjointed or complicated.
I’ll inform you what I imply by discussing their funnel builder as an instance. There were 3 different settings panels to take care of overall, individual, and item setups. Yet for some insane reason, the links to gain access to each of these core settings were expanded on contrary sides of the screen. What!?
As someone who values tidy, thoughtful design, this seriously upset me.
It enhanced that GoHighLevel still seemed like a work-in-progress as opposed to a polished product all set for prime-time use. Their concerns seemed focused on packing in every feature under the sun, with bad use as a second thought.
And talking features, I quickly realized the small cost tag included expensive concessions …
Deceptive Pricing GoHighLevel Point-of-Sale
One of GoHighLevel’s greatest marketing factors is the budget friendly price for accessibility to many features. But I quickly learned this inexpensive base expense was deceitful.
They nickle-and-dimed customers with sporadic costs for core functionality. Unexpectedly my charge card declarations had unclear $10 costs from GoHighLevel here and there.
As it ended up, you get charged every single time you send out an email with their web servers. So for high volume users, this added up to hundreds of bucks in unforeseen prices.
In between these per-email fees and paying additional for deliverability add-ons like Mailgun, my “budget friendly” GoHighLevel registration wound up costing dramatically MORE than my Keap plan.
The reduced price tag was tempting, but simply not reasonable in practice. This bait-and-switch left a negative taste in my mouth.
Email Rates Suffered
The last dealbreaker was seeing my thoroughly nurtured e-mail open prices plunge virtually over night after switching to GoHighLevel.
Formerly, my audience interaction continually struck 35-40% open prices in Keap month after month. But once I moved their records over to GoHighLevel, efficiency tanked quickly to a useless 9% open price.
Regardless of how much I optimized my sending methods or attempted every repairing technique, I can hardly push open rates back into the teenagers– still a 50%+ decrease from my previous criteria GoHighLevel Point-of-Sale.
Let me repeat: my exact same target market and emails all of a sudden had awful involvement. The only thing I could think that would be causing this was whatever was taking place behind the scenes at GoHighLevel. For a firm so depending on e-mail marketing, this was a big deal.
Between the debilitating deliverability concerns, hidden charges, busted features, and awful user interface, I had lastly reached my restriction …
Why I Give up GoHighLevel after 37 Days
Simply 45 days after moving my company to GoHighLevel, I knew I had actually made a big error. The disadvantages drastically outweighed any kind of benefits.
No software is ideal, but the large quantity of troubles was past appropriate.
At the end of the day, software program comes down to trust. If I can’t trust it to take care of crucial functions effectively or believe a supplier has my best interests in mind, after that it’s time to walk away– even after investing considerable time, cash, and initiative moving.
So I made the difficult contact us to reverse training course and return back to Keap entirely just weeks after going done in on GoHighLevel. Allow’s explore what I picked up from this ordeal.
Key Takeaways: What I Picked up from My GoHighLevel Blunder
My time with HighLevel can be summarized as an expensive misadventure. However in knowledge, it taught me a couple of key lessons:
- Adhere to what works. Don’t upset what’s working unless something is definitively better across the board. Modification brings threat.
- Veterinarian asserts completely. Marketing buzz around brand-new software application often covers larger underlying flaws. Deep due persistance is vital.
- Select simplicity over features. Well-designed tools should make your job life much easier, not extra difficult and untidy.
- Openness develops count on. Opaque pricing, dubious reseller terms, and finger-pointing to evade problems ruins trust fund.
- Look for unbiased reviews. Pleased assistance assesses imply less if too much issues suggest poor overall usability.
- Excellence is impossible. No single solution can completely meet every special business requirement. Locate the least-bad fit.
- Advancement over change. Step-by-step renovations generally outweigh high-risk wholesale reinvention of what already works penalty.
Simply put, I found out to be a lot more doubtful of “too good to be real” marketing insurance claims and less attracted by the allure of shiny brand-new things. The tools you use daily ought to gain depend on through openness and efficiency, not slick advertising.