As a firm owner for over a decade, I count on software program and automation to streamline procedures and supply outcomes. So when GoHighLevel arised on the scene couple of years back, it most definitely captured my focus GoHighLevel Recruiting Snapshot.
The idea was enticing– an all-in-one customer administration platform with marketing, sales, and service tools integrated together. As an entrepreneur constantly seeking to simplify and scale my business, it appeared like a desire happened on paper. Who wouldn’t desire a solitary service that does it all?
Yet in this thorough GoHighLevel testimonial, I’ll take you inside my disastrous trip of attempting (and stopping working) to switch to this popular new software application. You’ll find out:
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.
Spoiler: I do NOT suggest GoHighLevel. If you need a CRM, start with this list of best CRMs rather. I use Keap.
Some GoHighLevel Alternatives
If you’re searching for a sales, marketing, and job management choice to GoHighLevel, after that here are a few we advise.
Backstory: Why I Considered Changing from Keap
To understand what attracted me to GoHighLevel to begin with, you need context regarding my previous arrangement. For over 5 years I had been happily counting on Keap (formerly Infusionsoft) to satisfy all my client administration and automation needs.
I located Keap intuitive to make use of and it handled everything I required– CRM, e-mail marketing, sales funnels, membership sites, and customer assistance.
Keap’s CRM and sales and marketing automation are made to help small companies keep their clients while including brand-new ones easily. Automate follow-ups with emails and texts, making sure leads and customers obtain the ideal messages at the right time. Use internet site and social networks forms to simplify lead follow-up, and manage your development with very easy visit scheduling and lead monitoring. Boost sales with automated quoting, invoicing, and settlement processing, maximizing your time. With Keap, small businesses can conserve 10 hours weekly and rise revenue by 39%. Beginning with a 14-day free trial, no charge card required.
Why we like Keap
Keap offers a thorough client partnership monitoring (CRM) and marketing automation solution customized for small companies and entrepreneurs. We appreciate Keap’s concentrate on enhancing sales processes and supporting consumer relationships through effective automation tools. The system’s all-in-one approach combines CRM, e-mail marketing, invoicing, and task administration, making it particularly appealing for organizations wanting to settle their tech pile.
Generally, it simply functioned dependably with marginal hassle or upkeep needed. My open and click-through prices were wonderful (like 35% fantastic). Automations ran efficiently with no problems.
So why on earth was I lured to uproot my whole operational foundation from a system that functioned to try something unverified and untested?
In knowledge I can admit I obtained seduced by the alarm phone call of “shiny things disorder”. You understand the sensation: when everyone’s speaking about a new tool that will certainly revolutionize your company … The yard often looks greener on the other side, and I wondered whether GoHighLevel might minimize friction factors that I would certainly learned to tolerate over the years with Keap.
I resisted initially, but a couple of more disappointments led me to think maybe it was time for an adjustment.
The Investment: Migrating My Company to GoHighLevel
Previously this year I chose to take the plunge. I enrolled in HighLevel’s Firm plan at $297/month, spending dramatically more than the $97/month starter cost.
This had not been a choice I ignored. I understood switching systems was mosting likely to need migrating all my Keap data and basically rebuilding my whole technology facilities from square one making use of all of the GoHighLevel integrations readily available.
Right here’s an overview of just several of the effort required:
- Manually exporting 20,000+ e-mail subscriber records
- Recreating lots of automations and workflows
- Relocating client profiles, notes, and job information to the brand-new CRM
- Reconfiguring my Stripe invoicing integration
- Establishing landing pages, coupons, and sales funnels throughout once more
- Learning an entirely foreign UX and interface design
All in, I spent around 30-40 tiresome hours of arrangement work transitioning everything over– in addition to handling shed efficiency during the switch.
But ultimately, it was a calculated financial investment I wanted to make. I figured some short-term discomfort would certainly repay with GoHighLevel providing a far 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 actually made a big error. The concerns began piling up rapidly, up until it got to a factor I had to reduce my losses and change back to Keap entirely.
Let’s go through the nightmarish troubles I came across.
Safety Issues & Lots of Vermin
Given GoHighLevel placed itself as an all-in-one automation system, I took care to meticulously recreate every single workflow from my old Keap account.
These included series for onboarding brand-new email customers, onboarding brand-new clients, automating follow-ups for webinar registrations, sending out event suggestions, managing subscription expiries and a lot more.
Every little thing seemed to be working fine … until unexpectedly it wasn’t. One early morning, I awoke to discover 171 totally unimportant e-mails had actually been sent out to users who need to NOT have gotten them. This happened 3 days in a row, with a various set of 160 individuals every day.
I hysterically attempted fixing and rebuilding the automation from scratch. Yet the problem continued.
When I desperately reached out to their assistance group, they slightly declared “server problems” were at fault. Yet this explanation didn’t make any kind of feeling, given that the mistakes proceeded occurring each early morning like clockwork unassociated to any kind of downtime.
In my mind, this massive failing was totally undesirable and just didn’t help my company. I have thousands of calls relying on my automated campaigns running efficiently.
So if GoHighLevel was mosting likely to be completely unreliable, just how could I delegate mission-critical workflows and delicate customer information to their technology?
The unintuitive user interface just compounded these problems …
Aggravating UX
Coming from Keap where whatever was seamless and user-friendly, GoHighLevel’s learning curve felt high and challenging.
Easy jobs like modifying workflows entailed digging via menu systems that were all over the place. Secret setups were unexplainably spread in completely different sections. Moving in between functions 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 total, specific, and product setups. Yet for some crazy reason, the web links to gain access to each of these core setups were expanded on contrary sides of the display. What!?
As someone that values clean, thoughtful design, this seriously annoyed me.
It strengthened that GoHighLevel still seemed like a work-in-progress instead of a polished product all set for prime-time usage. Their priorities seemed concentrated on packing in every feature under the sun, with inadequate usability as a second thought.
And speaking of features, I soon understood the affordable price tag included expensive concessions …
Misleading Pricing GoHighLevel Recruiting Snapshot
Among GoHighLevel’s greatest marketing points is the budget-friendly cost for access to numerous features. But I swiftly discovered this cheap base price was deceitful.
They nickle-and-dimed individuals with occasional costs for core performance. Suddenly my credit card declarations had obscure $10 costs from GoHighLevel here and there.
As it ended up, you get billed whenever you send an e-mail via their web servers. So for high quantity individuals, this added up to numerous bucks in unexpected costs.
In between these per-email costs and paying additional for deliverability add-ons like Mailgun, my “budget friendly” GoHighLevel registration wound up costing substantially MORE than my Keap plan.
The low price tag was tempting, yet just not reasonable in practice. This bait-and-switch left a negative taste in my mouth.
Email Fees Suffered
The last dealbreaker was seeing my thoroughly supported e-mail open rates plummet nearly over night after changing to GoHighLevel.
Previously, my audience involvement constantly hit 35-40% open rates in Keap month after month. But once I migrated their documents over to GoHighLevel, efficiency tanked promptly to a pathetic 9% open rate.
No matter how much I optimized my sending out practices or attempted every troubleshooting technique, I could hardly nudge open rates back into the teenagers– still a 50%+ decline from my previous criteria GoHighLevel Recruiting Snapshot.
Let me repeat: my exact same audience and emails all of a sudden had horrible interaction. The only point I can think that would be triggering this was whatever was taking place behind the scenes at GoHighLevel. For a company so dependent on email marketing, this was a big deal.
Between the debilitating deliverability issues, hidden costs, busted features, and dreadful user interface, I had ultimately reached my restriction …
Why I Stop GoHighLevel after 37 Days
Just 45 days after migrating my company to GoHighLevel, I knew I had actually made a significant blunder. The cons drastically exceeded any kind of benefits.
No software application is excellent, yet the large volume of troubles was beyond acceptable.
At the end of the day, software program comes down to count on. If I can’t trust it to deal with vital functions capably or think a vendor has my benefits in mind, after that it’s time to leave– also after spending considerable time, cash, and initiative moving.
So I made the hard contact us to turn around training course and return back to Keap completely just weeks after going done in on GoHighLevel. Allow’s explore what I learned from this ordeal.
Key Takeaways: What I Gained from My GoHighLevel Error
My time with HighLevel can be summarized as a costly ill fortune. But in hindsight, it showed me a few essential lessons:
- Stay with what works. Do not distress what’s working unless something is definitively much better across the board. Modification brings threat.
- Vet asserts completely. Marketing hype around new software usually obscures larger underlying imperfections. Deep due diligence is essential.
- Select simpleness over features. Properly designed tools ought to make your job life less complicated, not extra complicated and unpleasant.
- Openness builds depend on. Nontransparent pricing, unethical reseller terms, and finger-pointing to evade issues damages trust.
- Look for honest reviews. Happy support examines imply less if extreme problems suggest inadequate total usability.
- Perfection is difficult. No solitary option can completely fulfill every unique organization need. Locate the least-bad fit.
- Development over revolution. Step-by-step enhancements generally exceed dangerous wholesale reinvention of what already works fine.
Basically, I discovered to be a lot more unconvinced of “also great to be real” marketing claims and less attracted by the allure of shiny new items. The tools you make use of daily must make trust fund with transparency and performance, not glossy advertising.