As a firm proprietor for over a years, I rely upon software program and automation to improve procedures and deliver outcomes. So when GoHighLevel arised on the scene couple of years back, it certainly captured my interest GoHighLevel Reselling.
The concept was enticing– an all-in-one customer management system with marketing, sales, and service devices incorporated with each other. As an entrepreneur constantly wanting to streamline and scale my service, it seemed like a desire happened on paper. Who would not desire a solitary service that does it all?
However in this in-depth GoHighLevel review, I’ll take you inside my dreadful trip of attempting (and falling short) to switch over to this preferred new software program. You’ll find out:
If you’re taking into consideration whether GoHighLevel is right for your very own company requirements, hopefully you can learn from my excruciating blunders and blew up assumptions.
Spoiler: I do NOT suggest GoHighLevel. If you require a CRM, begin with this list of best CRMs instead. I use Keap.
Some GoHighLevel Alternatives
If you’re looking for a sales, marketing, and job administration option to GoHighLevel, after that below are a few we advise.
Backstory: Why I Thought About Switching Over from Keap
To recognize what attracted me to GoHighLevel in the first place, you require context concerning my previous arrangement. For over 5 years I had been gladly counting on Keap (formerly Infusionsoft) to satisfy all my customer administration and automation demands.
I found Keap intuitive to utilize and it managed every little thing I required– CRM, email marketing, sales funnels, subscription websites, and customer assistance.
Keap’s CRM and sales and marketing automation are made to help small companies keep their customers while including brand-new ones effortlessly. Automate follow-ups with emails and messages, ensuring leads and clients obtain the right messages at the right time. Use web site and social media types to enhance lead follow-up, and manage your development with simple consultation organizing and lead tracking. Boost sales with automated pricing quote, invoicing, and payment handling, freeing up your time. With Keap, local business can save 10 hours per week and rise revenue by 39%. Start with a 14-day free trial, no credit card needed.
Why we like Keap
Keap provides a detailed customer relationship monitoring (CRM) and marketing automation solution tailored for small companies and entrepreneurs. We appreciate Keap’s concentrate on enhancing sales procedures and supporting client relationships with powerful automation tools. The system’s all-in-one strategy integrates CRM, e-mail marketing, invoicing, and job administration, making it specifically attractive for organizations looking to combine their technology stack.
Generally, it simply functioned accurately with marginal difficulty or upkeep called for. My open and click-through prices were wonderful (like 35% wonderful). Automations ran efficiently with no issues.
So why in the world was I lured to uproot my whole operational foundation from a system that functioned to try something unproven and untested?
In hindsight I can admit I got attracted by the alarm phone call of “shiny things disorder”. You recognize the sensation: when everybody’s discussing a brand-new device that will revolutionize your organization … The yard typically looks greener beyond, and I questioned whether GoHighLevel could decrease friction points that I would certainly found out to endure throughout the years with Keap.
I resisted at first, but a few more aggravations led me to think maybe it was time for a change.
The Financial investment: Moving My Agency to GoHighLevel
Earlier this year I decided to start. I registered for HighLevel’s Company plan at $297/month, investing significantly more than the $97/month starter price.
This had not been a choice I ignored. I recognized changing systems was mosting likely to call for migrating all my Keap data and basically reconstructing my entire technology infrastructure from scratch making use of all of the GoHighLevel integrations available.
Here’s a summary of just several of the effort called for:
- Manually exporting 20,000+ email customer records
- Recreating lots of automations and workflows
- Moving client profiles, notes, and project information to the new CRM
- Reconfiguring my Stripe payment integration
- Setting up landing pages, discounts, and sales funnels all over once more
- Learning a completely foreign UX and user interface layout
Done in, I spent around 30-40 tedious hours of arrangement work transitioning everything over– and also dealing with lost performance during the button.
Yet inevitably, it was a calculated financial investment I agreed to make. I figured some temporary pain would pay off with GoHighLevel giving a much better lasting option for my organization, Dripify. Oh how incorrect I was …
It only took me regarding a month of hands-on usage to realize I had made a big mistake. The issues started piling up quickly, until it reached a point I needed to cut my losses and change back to Keap completely.
Let’s walk through the horrible troubles I experienced.
Safety Issues & Lots of Vermin
Given GoHighLevel positioned itself as an all-in-one automation system, I made sure to diligently recreate every workflow from my old Keap account.
These consisted of series for onboarding new e-mail customers, onboarding brand-new clients, automating follow-ups for webinar registrations, sending event suggestions, managing subscription expirations and much more.
Everything seemed to be operating fine … up until all of a sudden it had not been. One early morning, I woke up to find 171 totally irrelevant emails had been sent out to individuals who need to NOT have received them. This took place three days in a row, with a various set of 160 individuals each day.
I desperately attempted fixing and rebuilding the automation from square one. But the issue continued.
When I seriously connected to their support team, they slightly asserted “web server issues” were at fault. But this description didn’t make any kind of sense, considering that the mistakes proceeded happening each early morning like clockwork unassociated to any kind of downtime.
In my mind, this huge failing was totally inappropriate and just didn’t benefit my service. I have thousands of calls relying upon my automated campaigns running smoothly.
So if GoHighLevel was going to be totally undependable, exactly how could I turn over mission-critical workflows and sensitive client data to their modern technology?
The unintuitive interface just compounded these problems …
Aggravating UX
Originating from Keap where whatever was seamless and intuitive, GoHighLevel’s learning curve felt high and complex.
Straightforward tasks like modifying workflows involved digging through menu systems that were all over the place. Secret settings were unexplainably spread in totally different areas. Moving between features really felt disjointed or complicated.
I’ll inform you what I suggest by discussing their funnel builder as an example. There were 3 separate setups panels to take care of overall, specific, and product configurations. Yet for some insane factor, the web links to gain access to each of these core settings were spread out on contrary sides of the screen. What!?
As somebody that values clean, thoughtful design, this seriously upset me.
It strengthened that GoHighLevel still seemed like a work-in-progress instead of a refined product ready for prime-time usage. Their priorities seemed concentrated on stuffing in every feature under the sun, with bad usability as an afterthought.
And speaking of features, I soon understood the affordable price tag came with expensive concessions …
Misleading Pricing GoHighLevel Reselling
Among GoHighLevel’s largest selling factors is the cost effective rate for accessibility to many features. However I promptly discovered this affordable base price was misleading.
They nickle-and-dimed customers with sporadic fees for core performance. Unexpectedly my credit card statements had unclear $10 charges from GoHighLevel occasionally.
As it ended up, you get charged every time you send out an e-mail via their servers. So for high quantity users, this amounted to hundreds of bucks in unforeseen costs.
In between these per-email charges and paying added for deliverability attachments like Mailgun, my “budget friendly” GoHighLevel registration ended up setting you back significantly greater than my Keap plan.
The reduced price tag was appealing, but just not realistic in practice. This bait-and-switch left a poor preference in my mouth.
Email Fees Suffered
The last dealbreaker was seeing my thoroughly supported email open rates drop practically over night after changing to GoHighLevel.
Previously, my target market interaction constantly hit 35-40% open rates in Keap month after month. Once I moved their records over to GoHighLevel, efficiency tanked immediately to a worthless 9% open price.
Regardless of just how much I enhanced my sending out methods or tried every fixing method, I might barely push open prices back into the teenagers– still a 50%+ decrease from my previous criteria GoHighLevel Reselling.
Let me repeat: my exact same audience and emails unexpectedly had horrible interaction. The only thing I could assume that would certainly be creating this was whatever was occurring behind the scenes at GoHighLevel. For an agency so based on e-mail marketing, this was a big deal.
In between the debilitating deliverability issues, concealed costs, broken features, and awful user interface, I had ultimately reached my limit …
Why I Stop GoHighLevel after 37 Days
Simply 45 days after moving my agency to GoHighLevel, I recognized I had actually made a substantial error. The disadvantages dramatically exceeded any benefits.
No software application is ideal, yet the sheer volume of issues was past appropriate.
At the end of the day, software comes down to trust fund. If I can’t trust it to deal with vital features properly or believe a vendor has my benefits in mind, then it’s time to leave– also after investing considerable time, money, and initiative migrating.
So I made the hard phone call to turn around course and return back to Keap entirely simply weeks after going all in on GoHighLevel. Let’s discover what I gained from this fiasco.
Trick Takeaways: What I Gained from My GoHighLevel Mistake
My time with HighLevel can be summed up as a pricey ill fortune. Yet in knowledge, it instructed me a few vital lessons:
- Stick to what jobs. Do not distress what’s working unless something is definitively better across the board. Modification brings danger.
- Vet asserts completely. Marketing buzz around brand-new software program frequently covers bigger underlying imperfections. Deep due diligence is crucial.
- Select simpleness over features. Well-designed devices should make your job life much easier, not much more complex and unpleasant.
- Transparency develops count on. Opaque pricing, unethical reseller terms, and finger-pointing to escape troubles damages trust fund.
- Seek objective evaluations. Delighted support reviews indicate less if excessive issues suggest inadequate overall use.
- Excellence is difficult. No single remedy can completely fulfill every one-of-a-kind business requirement. Locate the least-bad fit.
- Evolution over revolution. Incremental renovations commonly outweigh risky wholesale reinvention of what currently functions penalty.
Basically, I found out to be much more skeptical of “also great to be true” marketing claims and less lured by the allure of shiny new things. The devices you make use of daily need to gain trust fund via transparency and efficiency, not slick advertising.