As a company owner for over a decade, I count on software program and automation to enhance operations and supply results. So when GoHighLevel arised on the scene couple of years back, it certainly captured my interest GoHighLevel Prospecting Tool.
The concept was attractive– an all-in-one client monitoring platform with marketing, sales, and solution tools incorporated with each other. As a business owner always looking to simplify and scale my service, it seemed like a desire happened theoretically. That wouldn’t want a solitary service that does it all?
Yet in this thorough GoHighLevel review, I’ll take you inside my disastrous trip of attempting (and failing) to change to this prominent brand-new software. You’ll learn:
If you’re considering whether GoHighLevel is right for your very own company needs, ideally you can gain from my unpleasant blunders and inflated expectations.
Spoiler: I do NOT advise GoHighLevel. If you need a CRM, begin with this checklist of finest CRMs instead. I make use of Keap.
Some GoHighLevel Alternatives
If you’re trying to find a sales, marketing, and task management option to GoHighLevel, after that right here are a few we suggest.
Backstory: Why I Thought About Changing from Keap
To understand what attracted me to GoHighLevel in the first place, you require context regarding my previous setup. For over 5 years I had been happily counting on Keap (previously Infusionsoft) to satisfy all my client administration and automation requirements.
I located Keap intuitive to use and it handled every little thing I needed– CRM, e-mail marketing, sales funnels, membership sites, and client support.
Keap’s CRM and sales and marketing automation are made to assist small businesses keep their customers while adding new ones easily. Automate follow-ups with emails and messages, ensuring leads and customers get the ideal messages at the right time. Use website and social networks types to enhance lead follow-up, and handle your growth with easy consultation scheduling and lead tracking. Boost sales with automated quoting, invoicing, and repayment handling, freeing up your time. With Keap, local business can conserve 10 hours weekly and increase earnings by 39%. Start with a 14-day free trial, no bank card needed.
Why we like Keap
Keap offers an extensive client partnership monitoring (CRM) and marketing automation remedy tailored for small businesses and business owners. We appreciate Keap’s concentrate on enhancing sales procedures and nurturing customer relationships via powerful automation tools. The system’s all-in-one technique incorporates CRM, e-mail marketing, invoicing, and task management, making it specifically eye-catching for companies wanting to consolidate their tech pile.
For the most part, it simply functioned accurately with minimal fuss or maintenance called for. My open and click-through prices were wonderful (like 35% terrific). Automations ran efficiently with no concerns.
So why in the world was I tempted to uproot my whole operational foundation from a system that worked to try something unverified and untested?
In knowledge I can confess I obtained attracted by the siren call of “shiny things syndrome”. You recognize the sensation: when everyone’s talking about a brand-new tool that will certainly change your organization … The lawn frequently looks greener on the other side, and I wondered whether GoHighLevel may lower friction points that I would certainly discovered to tolerate throughout the years with Keap.
I resisted in the beginning, however a couple of even more irritations led me to believe maybe it was time for a modification.
The Investment: Moving My Company to GoHighLevel
Previously this year I chose to take the plunge. I enrolled in HighLevel’s Agency plan at $297/month, spending significantly more than the $97/month starter expense.
This wasn’t a choice I ignored. I recognized switching systems was mosting likely to need migrating all my Keap data and basically rebuilding my whole tech framework from scratch making use of every one of the GoHighLevel integrations offered.
Below’s a review of simply several of the effort needed:
- By hand exporting 20,000+ email subscriber records
- Recreating loads of automations and workflows
- Relocating client accounts, notes, and project information to the new CRM
- Reconfiguring my Stripe billing integration
- Establishing landing pages, promos, and sales funnels all over once more
- Learning a completely foreign UX and interface layout
All in, I spent around 30-40 laborious hours of arrangement job transitioning every little thing over– in addition to managing lost productivity during the button.
However ultimately, it was a calculated financial investment I wanted to make. I figured some short-term pain would certainly repay with GoHighLevel giving a far better long-term solution for my organization, Dripify. Oh how wrong I was …
It only took me about a month of hands-on usage to recognize I had made a huge mistake. The problems started piling up promptly, till it got to a point I needed to reduce my losses and switch over back to Keap completely.
Allow’s go through the nightmarish troubles I ran into.
Safety Issues & Numerous Bugs
Offered GoHighLevel placed itself as an all-in-one automation platform, I took care to carefully recreate every workflow from my old Keap account.
These consisted of sequences for onboarding new e-mail clients, onboarding new clients, automating follow-ups for webinar enrollments, sending event suggestions, managing membership expiries and much more.
Everything appeared to be functioning penalty … until unexpectedly it had not been. One early morning, I awoke to discover 171 totally unimportant e-mails had actually been sent out to customers who should NOT have actually received them. This happened 3 days straight, with a different batch of 160 people every day.
I desperately tried fixing and restoring the automation from the ground up. However the issue continued.
When I desperately reached out to their support group, they vaguely claimed “web server issues” were to blame. However this explanation really did not make any kind of feeling, considering that the errors proceeded happening each early morning like clockwork unassociated to any type of downtime.
In my mind, this huge failure was completely undesirable and simply didn’t work for my service. I have countless contacts counting on my automated campaigns running smoothly.
So if GoHighLevel was going to be absolutely unreliable, just how could I entrust mission-critical workflows and sensitive customer information to their innovation?
The unintuitive interface just intensified these issues …
Frustrating UX
Originating from Keap where every little thing was seamless and instinctive, GoHighLevel’s learning contour felt high and difficult.
Easy jobs like editing and enhancing workflows entailed digging with food selection systems that were all over the place. Trick setups were unexplainably scattered in entirely various areas. Relocating in between functions really felt disjointed or confusing.
I’ll inform you what I suggest by talking about their funnel builder as an example. There were 3 different settings panels to handle general, specific, and item configurations. Yet for some insane factor, the web links to gain access to each of these core setups were spread out on opposite sides of the display. What!?
As someone that values clean, thoughtful layout, this seriously irritated me.
It reinforced that GoHighLevel still seemed like a work-in-progress rather than a sleek product ready for prime-time usage. Their concerns appeared focused on stuffing in every feature under the sun, with poor use as an afterthought.
And speaking of features, I quickly realized the affordable price tag included expensive concessions …
Deceptive Pricing GoHighLevel Prospecting Tool
Among GoHighLevel’s biggest marketing points is the budget-friendly price for accessibility to many features. Yet I promptly learned this economical base expense was misleading.
They nickle-and-dimed users with occasional charges for core performance. Suddenly my credit card declarations had unclear $10 charges from GoHighLevel here and there.
As it turned out, you get billed every time you send out an e-mail through their web servers. So for high volume customers, this amounted to numerous dollars in unexpected prices.
Between these per-email fees and paying additional for deliverability attachments like Mailgun, my “cost effective” GoHighLevel membership ended up setting you back considerably MORE than my Keap plan.
The low price tag was alluring, yet simply not sensible in practice. This bait-and-switch left a bad taste in my mouth.
Email Rates Suffered
The last dealbreaker was seeing my very carefully supported e-mail open rates plunge almost overnight after changing to GoHighLevel.
Previously, my audience engagement continually hit 35-40% open rates in Keap month after month. Once I moved their documents over to GoHighLevel, efficiency tanked promptly to a pitiful 9% open price.
Despite just how much I optimized my sending out practices or attempted every fixing technique, I could barely push open prices back right into the teenagers– still a 50%+ decline from my previous criteria GoHighLevel Prospecting Tool.
Let me repeat: my exact same audience and emails unexpectedly had terrible interaction. The only point I could think that would be creating this was whatever was taking place behind the scenes at GoHighLevel. For a firm so dependent on email marketing, this was a big deal.
In between the debilitating deliverability issues, concealed charges, busted features, and horrible interface, I had actually ultimately reached my restriction …
Why I Stop GoHighLevel after 37 Days
Just 45 days after migrating my firm to GoHighLevel, I recognized I had actually made a significant error. The disadvantages dramatically surpassed any kind of advantages.
No software is perfect, however the large quantity of troubles was past appropriate.
At the end of the day, software program comes down to count on. If I can not trust it to take care of vital features competently or think a vendor has my best interests in mind, after that it’s time to walk away– also after investing considerable time, cash, and initiative moving.
So I made the tough phone call to turn around training course and return back to Keap entirely just weeks after going done in on GoHighLevel. Let’s discover what I picked up from this ordeal.
Trick Takeaways: What I Learned From My GoHighLevel Mistake
My time with HighLevel can be summarized as a pricey misadventure. However in hindsight, it taught me a few crucial lessons:
- Stick to what works. Don’t distress what’s functioning unless something is definitively far better across the board. Modification brings threat.
- Veterinarian asserts completely. Marketing buzz around brand-new software typically obscures bigger underlying flaws. Deep due diligence is necessary.
- Pick simplicity over features. Properly designed tools ought to make your work life less complicated, not extra difficult and unpleasant.
- Openness builds trust. Opaque pricing, dubious reseller terms, and finger-pointing to escape issues ruins count on.
- Seek impartial testimonials. Happy support examines indicate much less if excessive concerns suggest inadequate general functionality.
- Perfection is difficult. No single remedy can completely meet every special service need. Find the least-bad fit.
- Advancement over transformation. Incremental improvements typically surpass dangerous wholesale reinvention of what currently functions penalty.
Basically, I found out to be a lot more skeptical of “also good to be true” marketing claims and much less tempted by the appeal of glossy new objects. The tools you make use of daily need to gain count on through openness and performance, not slick advertising.