As an agency proprietor for over a decade, I depend on software program and automation to streamline procedures and provide results. So when GoHighLevel arised on the scene couple of years back, it absolutely captured my interest GoHighLevel Power Dialer.
The concept was attractive– an all-in-one client administration system with marketing, sales, and solution devices integrated together. As an entrepreneur constantly aiming to streamline and scale my business, it appeared like a dream come to life theoretically. Who would not desire a single solution that does it all?
However in this in-depth GoHighLevel testimonial, I’ll take you inside my devastating trip of trying (and falling short) to switch over to this preferred new software application. You’ll discover:
If you’re considering whether GoHighLevel is right for your own organization requirements, ideally you can learn from my painful errors and blew up expectations.
Spoiler: I do NOT suggest GoHighLevel. If you require a CRM, begin with this checklist of finest CRMs rather. I make use of Keap.
Some GoHighLevel Alternatives
If you’re trying to find a sales, marketing, and project administration alternative to GoHighLevel, then right here are a few we suggest.
Backstory: Why I Considered Switching Over from Keap
To understand what attracted me to GoHighLevel to begin with, you need context about my previous configuration. For over 5 years I had been happily relying upon Keap (formerly Infusionsoft) to satisfy all my client management and automation requirements.
I discovered Keap intuitive to make use of and it took care of everything I required– CRM, email marketing, sales funnels, membership sites, and client assistance.
Keap’s CRM and sales and marketing automation are made to help small businesses keep their customers while including new ones effortlessly. Automate follow-ups with e-mails and texts, ensuring leads and clients receive the right messages at the right time. Use web site and social media sites kinds to improve lead follow-up, and manage your growth with easy consultation scheduling and lead monitoring. Boost sales with automated quoting, invoicing, and payment processing, liberating your time. With Keap, small companies can conserve 10 hours weekly and boost earnings by 39%. Begin with a 14-day free trial, no bank card called for.
Why we like Keap
Keap provides a detailed consumer partnership management (CRM) and marketing automation solution customized for small businesses and business owners. We value Keap’s concentrate on improving sales procedures and supporting customer partnerships with effective automation devices. The system’s all-in-one technique integrates CRM, email marketing, invoicing, and task monitoring, making it specifically eye-catching for companies wanting to combine their technology stack.
For the most part, it just worked dependably with marginal fuss or maintenance needed. My open and click-through prices were wonderful (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 worked to try something unproven and untried?
In knowledge I can confess I got seduced by the alarm call of “glossy things disorder”. You know the sensation: when everybody’s talking about a new tool that will certainly change your business … The lawn frequently looks greener beyond, and I questioned whether GoHighLevel could minimize friction factors that I would certainly found out to tolerate over the years with Keap.
I stood up to initially, however a couple of more disappointments led me to think perhaps it was time for a change.
The Financial investment: Migrating My Firm to GoHighLevel
Earlier this year I chose to take the plunge. I enrolled in HighLevel’s Company plan at $297/month, spending significantly greater than the $97/month starter price.
This had not been a choice I ignored. I recognized switching systems was going to call for migrating all my Keap information and basically restoring my whole tech facilities from the ground up using every one of the GoHighLevel integrations available.
Here’s a review of simply a few of the effort needed:
- Manually exporting 20,000+ email subscriber records
- Recreating dozens of automations and workflows
- Moving client profiles, notes, and project data to the brand-new CRM
- Reconfiguring my Stripe invoicing integration
- Setting up landing pages, discounts, and sales funnels throughout again
- Learning a completely foreign UX and user interface style
All in, I invested around 30-40 laborious hours of arrangement work transitioning everything over– and also handling shed productivity throughout the button.
Yet inevitably, it was a calculated investment I agreed to make. I figured some short-term pain would repay with GoHighLevel providing a better long-lasting remedy for my service, Dripify. Oh just how incorrect I was …
It only took me about a month of hands-on use to understand I had made a huge error. The problems began accumulating rapidly, till it got to a point I needed to reduce my losses and change back to Keap entirely.
Allow’s walk through the horrible troubles I encountered.
Protection Issues & Lots of Vermin
Offered GoHighLevel positioned itself as an all-in-one automation system, I took care to carefully recreate each and every single workflow from my old Keap account.
These included series for onboarding new email customers, onboarding brand-new clients, automating follow-ups for webinar registrations, sending occasion suggestions, handling subscription expiries and much more.
Every little thing appeared to be operating penalty … until unexpectedly it had not been. One early morning, I woke up to locate 171 entirely unimportant e-mails had actually been sent out to users who need to NOT have actually obtained them. This took place three days straight, with a various set of 160 individuals every day.
I frantically attempted fixing and reconstructing the automation from scratch. Yet the trouble continued.
When I desperately reached out to their assistance group, they slightly claimed “web server problems” were responsible. But this description didn’t make any kind of feeling, considering that the errors continued taking place each early morning like clockwork unassociated to any kind of downtime.
In my mind, this enormous failure was totally undesirable and simply really did not benefit my organization. I have countless contacts counting on my automated campaigns running efficiently.
So if GoHighLevel was mosting likely to be completely undependable, exactly how could I entrust mission-critical workflows and sensitive client information to their modern technology?
The unintuitive user interface just worsened these problems …
Irritating UX
Coming from Keap where every little thing was smooth and instinctive, GoHighLevel’s learning contour really felt steep and challenging.
Basic jobs like modifying workflows entailed excavating via food selection systems that were all over the place. Trick setups were unexplainably scattered in entirely different sections. Moving in between features really felt disjointed or complex.
I’ll tell you what I suggest by discussing their funnel builder as an example. There were 3 different setups panels to manage general, private, and product arrangements. Yet for some insane factor, the web links to accessibility each of these core setups were expanded on opposite sides of the display. What!?
As someone that values clean, thoughtful design, this seriously annoyed me.
It enhanced that GoHighLevel still felt like a work-in-progress instead of a refined product prepared for prime-time use. Their priorities seemed focused on stuffing in every feature under the sun, with poor functionality as an afterthought.
And talking features, I quickly understood the small cost tag featured costly concessions …
Misleading Pricing GoHighLevel Power Dialer
One of GoHighLevel’s largest marketing factors is the budget friendly price for access to numerous features. However I swiftly learned this cheap base expense was misleading.
They nickle-and-dimed users with sporadic costs for core capability. Instantly my credit card declarations had vague $10 costs from GoHighLevel here and there.
As it ended up, you get billed every time you send out an email via their web servers. So for high quantity individuals, this amounted to thousands of dollars in unanticipated expenses.
In between these per-email fees and paying additional for deliverability add-ons like Mailgun, my “affordable” GoHighLevel subscription ended up costing significantly MORE than my Keap plan.
The low sticker price was tempting, however simply not realistic in practice. This bait-and-switch left a bad taste in my mouth.
Email Fees Suffered
The last dealbreaker was seeing my very carefully nurtured e-mail open prices plummet virtually overnight after changing to GoHighLevel.
Previously, my audience involvement consistently hit 35-40% open rates in Keap month after month. Once I moved their records over to GoHighLevel, efficiency tanked quickly to a worthless 9% open price.
No matter how much I enhanced my sending out methods or attempted every fixing method, I could hardly push open prices back right into the teenagers– still a 50%+ decrease from my previous standards GoHighLevel Power Dialer.
Let me repeat: my exact same target market and e-mails unexpectedly had awful interaction. The only point I could believe that would certainly be triggering this was whatever was taking place behind the scenes at GoHighLevel. For a firm so dependent on e-mail marketing, this was a big deal.
Between the debilitating deliverability problems, concealed fees, damaged features, and terrible interface, I had actually lastly reached my limitation …
Why I Give up GoHighLevel after 37 Days
Just 45 days after moving my company to GoHighLevel, I knew I had actually made a significant error. The cons considerably outweighed any type of benefits.
No software application is best, but the sheer volume of issues was beyond acceptable.
At the end of the day, software application comes down to count on. If I can not trust it to take care of crucial features effectively or think a vendor has my best interests in mind, then it’s time to leave– also after investing substantial time, money, and initiative moving.
So I made the challenging phone call to turn around training course and return back to Keap totally simply weeks after going done in on GoHighLevel. Allow’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 ill fortune. However in knowledge, it showed me a couple of key lessons:
- Adhere to what jobs. Don’t distress what’s functioning unless something is definitively far better across the board. Change brings risk.
- Vet declares completely. Marketing buzz around new software application frequently obscures bigger underlying problems. Deep due persistance is crucial.
- Pick simpleness over features. Properly designed tools need to make your job life less complicated, not extra challenging and messy.
- Openness develops trust. Opaque pricing, unethical reseller terms, and finger-pointing to escape problems damages trust fund.
- Seek impartial testimonials. Happy support examines indicate much less if extreme issues indicate poor total functionality.
- Excellence is difficult. No solitary solution can perfectly meet every one-of-a-kind service requirement. Discover the least-bad fit.
- Evolution over transformation. Incremental enhancements generally outweigh dangerous wholesale reinvention of what currently functions penalty.
In other words, I discovered to be a lot more skeptical of “as well good to be true” marketing cases and less tempted by the appeal of glossy brand-new things. The tools you use daily should make count on via openness and performance, not glossy advertising.