As a company owner for over a years, I depend on software application and automation to enhance procedures and provide results. So when GoHighLevel emerged on the scene few years back, it definitely captured my interest GoHighLevel Pro SaaS Plan.
The concept was appealing– an all-in-one client monitoring platform with marketing, sales, and solution tools incorporated together. As an entrepreneur constantly looking to simplify and scale my organization, it felt like a desire happened theoretically. Who would not want a solitary remedy that does it all?
However in this thorough GoHighLevel testimonial, I’ll take you inside my dreadful journey of attempting (and failing) to change to this preferred brand-new software. You’ll learn:
If you’re considering whether GoHighLevel is right for your very own organization demands, ideally you can learn from my painful mistakes and inflated expectations.
Looter: I do NOT suggest GoHighLevel. If you need a CRM, begin with this list of best CRMs rather. I make use of Keap.
Some GoHighLevel Alternatives
If you’re trying to find a sales, marketing, and task monitoring option to GoHighLevel, then here are a couple of we recommend.
Backstory: Why I Thought About Switching from Keap
To comprehend what attracted me to GoHighLevel to begin with, you require context about my previous setup. For over 5 years I had been happily depending on Keap (previously Infusionsoft) to meet all my client management and automation requirements.
I found Keap user-friendly to make use of and it dealt with every little thing I required– CRM, email marketing, sales funnels, membership sites, and client assistance.
Keap’s CRM and sales and marketing automation are designed to aid small businesses keep their clients while including new ones effortlessly. Automate follow-ups with emails and texts, guaranteeing leads and customers obtain the best messages at the right time. Usage site and social networks forms to simplify lead follow-up, and handle your growth with easy appointment organizing and lead tracking. Boost sales with automated pricing estimate, invoicing, and repayment handling, freeing up your time. With Keap, local business can conserve 10 hours weekly and boost revenue by 39%. Beginning with a 14-day free trial, no charge card called for.
Why we like Keap
Keap uses a comprehensive client connection administration (CRM) and marketing automation remedy tailored for local business and entrepreneurs. We appreciate Keap’s focus on streamlining sales processes and nurturing consumer connections through effective automation tools. The system’s all-in-one method integrates CRM, email marketing, invoicing, and job management, making it specifically attractive for organizations wanting to consolidate their technology pile.
Generally, it simply functioned dependably with marginal hassle or upkeep called for. My open and click-through prices were fantastic (like 35% terrific). Automations ran efficiently without any issues.
So why on earth was I tempted to uproot my whole functional foundation from a system that worked to attempt something unproven and untested?
In hindsight I can confess I obtained seduced by the siren phone call of “glossy object syndrome”. You recognize the feeling: when every person’s talking about a brand-new device that will certainly revolutionize your company … The yard typically looks greener beyond, and I wondered whether GoHighLevel might lower rubbing points that I ‘d learned to tolerate throughout the years with Keap.
I stood up to in the beginning, but a few more frustrations led me to believe maybe it was time for a modification.
The Financial investment: Moving My Firm to GoHighLevel
Earlier this year I made a decision to start. I signed up for HighLevel’s Firm plan at $297/month, spending dramatically more than the $97/month starter price.
This wasn’t a choice I ignored. I recognized changing systems was mosting likely to call for migrating all my Keap data and essentially rebuilding my entire technology facilities from square one utilizing all of the GoHighLevel integrations available.
Here’s an overview of just a few of the initiative called for:
- By hand exporting 20,000+ e-mail customer records
- Recreating lots of automations and workflows
- Moving customer accounts, notes, and task data to the new CRM
- Reconfiguring my Stripe invoicing integration
- Setting up landing pages, promos, and sales funnels throughout once more
- Learning a completely foreign UX and user interface style
Done in, I spent around 30-40 laborious hours of configuration job transitioning everything over– in addition to dealing with shed efficiency during the switch.
Yet inevitably, it was a computed financial investment I agreed to make. I figured some short-term discomfort would certainly pay off with GoHighLevel offering a better lasting service for my service, Dripify. Oh exactly how incorrect I was …
It just took me regarding a month of hands-on usage to recognize I had actually made a big error. The issues began piling up rapidly, until it got to a point I had to reduce my losses and switch back to Keap entirely.
Allow’s walk through the nightmarish troubles I ran into.
Safety Issues & Lots of Bugs
Offered GoHighLevel positioned itself as an all-in-one automation platform, I made sure to meticulously recreate every single workflow from my old Keap account.
These consisted of sequences for onboarding new e-mail customers, onboarding brand-new clients, automating follow-ups for webinar enrollments, sending out occasion pointers, taking care of membership expiries and far more.
Everything seemed to be working fine … till all of a sudden it had not been. One early morning, I woke up to find 171 entirely unimportant e-mails had actually been sent out to customers that should NOT have actually obtained them. This took place three days in a row, with a different batch of 160 people daily.
I anxiously attempted troubleshooting and reconstructing the automation from square one. Yet the problem lingered.
When I desperately connected to their support group, they vaguely asserted “web server concerns” were at fault. However this description didn’t make any sense, since the mistakes proceeded occurring each morning like clockwork unconnected to any downtime.
In my mind, this substantial failure was completely undesirable and just didn’t work for my company. I have countless contacts counting on my automated campaigns running efficiently.
So if GoHighLevel was going to be entirely unstable, exactly how could I hand over mission-critical workflows and delicate client data to their innovation?
The unintuitive interface only intensified these problems …
Frustrating UX
Originating from Keap where everything was seamless and intuitive, GoHighLevel’s learning contour really felt high and complex.
Easy jobs like editing and enhancing workflows involved digging with food selection systems that were all over the place. Secret settings were unexplainably spread in absolutely different areas. Relocating between features felt disjointed or complicated.
I’ll tell you what I mean by speaking about their funnel builder as an example. There were 3 different settings panels to take care of total, private, and product setups. Yet for some crazy reason, the links to access each of these core settings were spread out on contrary sides of the display. What!?
As somebody that values clean, thoughtful style, this seriously frustrated me.
It strengthened that GoHighLevel still seemed like a work-in-progress as opposed to a polished item prepared for prime-time use. Their concerns seemed focused on cramming in every feature under the sun, with poor usability as an afterthought.
And talking features, I quickly understood the low cost tag featured costly compromises …
Deceptive Pricing GoHighLevel Pro SaaS Plan
Among GoHighLevel’s most significant selling factors is the cost effective price for accessibility to numerous features. But I rapidly learned this economical base expense was misleading.
They nickle-and-dimed customers with erratic fees for core performance. Instantly my bank card declarations had obscure $10 charges from GoHighLevel here and there.
As it ended up, you obtain charged every time you send out an e-mail with their servers. So for high quantity individuals, this amounted to hundreds of dollars in unexpected costs.
Between these per-email charges and paying additional for deliverability attachments like Mailgun, my “affordable” GoHighLevel membership wound up setting you back significantly greater than my Keap plan.
The low sticker price was appealing, however simply not reasonable in practice. This bait-and-switch left a poor preference in my mouth.
Email Fees Suffered
The last dealbreaker was seeing my carefully nurtured e-mail open rates plunge nearly over night after switching to GoHighLevel.
Previously, my audience interaction constantly hit 35-40% open prices in Keap month after month. But once I migrated their documents over to GoHighLevel, performance tanked promptly to a worthless 9% open rate.
Regardless of how much I optimized my sending out methods or attempted every troubleshooting technique, I might hardly nudge open rates back right into the teenagers– still a 50%+ decrease from my previous benchmarks GoHighLevel Pro SaaS Plan.
Let me repeat: my exact same audience and e-mails suddenly had terrible interaction. The only thing I might assume that would certainly be causing this was whatever was occurring behind the scenes at GoHighLevel. For a company so dependent on e-mail marketing, this was a big deal.
In between the crippling deliverability concerns, concealed costs, busted features, and awful interface, I had lastly reached my limit …
Why I Give up GoHighLevel after 37 Days
Simply 45 days after moving my firm to GoHighLevel, I understood I had made a huge error. The cons considerably exceeded any advantages.
No software is best, but the sheer quantity of troubles was past acceptable.
At the end of the day, software boils down to depend on. If I can’t trust it to deal with critical functions competently or think a supplier has my benefits in mind, then it’s time to leave– even after investing significant time, money, and effort moving.
So I made the difficult call to reverse program and return back to Keap totally simply weeks after going all in on GoHighLevel. Let’s discover what I picked up from this fiasco.
Key Takeaways: What I Learned From My GoHighLevel Blunder
My time with HighLevel can be summed up as a costly accident. Yet in hindsight, it educated me a couple of vital lessons:
- Adhere to what jobs. Do not distress what’s working unless something is definitively better across the board. Adjustment brings threat.
- Veterinarian asserts extensively. Marketing buzz around new software often covers bigger underlying problems. Deep due persistance is important.
- Pick simpleness over features. Well-designed devices need to make your job life less complicated, not much more complicated and messy.
- Transparency builds trust. Opaque pricing, unethical reseller terms, and finger-pointing to avert troubles damages count on.
- Seek objective testimonials. Pleased support assesses suggest much less if excessive problems indicate inadequate general use.
- Excellence is impossible. No solitary service can completely meet every distinct service demand. Discover the least-bad fit.
- Evolution over revolution. Step-by-step renovations generally exceed high-risk wholesale reinvention of what currently functions penalty.
Simply put, I found out to be more doubtful of “also great to be true” marketing insurance claims and less attracted by the appeal of shiny new objects. The tools you use daily must make depend on through transparency and efficiency, not glossy advertising.