As a firm owner for over a decade, I count on software and automation to streamline procedures and deliver results. So when GoHighLevel emerged on the scene few years back, it absolutely caught my focus GoHighLevel SaaS Blueprint.
The concept was enticing– an all-in-one client management system with marketing, sales, and service tools incorporated with each other. As a business owner always wanting to simplify and scale my organization, it felt like a desire happened on paper. That would not want a single solution that does it all?
Yet in this thorough GoHighLevel evaluation, I’ll take you inside my tragic journey of attempting (and stopping working) to switch over to this preferred brand-new software program. You’ll discover:
If you’re taking into consideration whether GoHighLevel is right for your very own organization requirements, with any luck you can pick up from my excruciating mistakes and inflated expectations.
Looter: I do NOT advise GoHighLevel. If you require a CRM, start with this checklist of ideal CRMs instead. I utilize Keap.
Some GoHighLevel Alternatives
If you’re trying to find a sales, marketing, and project administration alternative to GoHighLevel, after that right here are a few we suggest.
Backstory: Why I Thought About Switching Over from Keap
To understand what attracted me to GoHighLevel in the first place, you require context regarding my previous configuration. For over 5 years I had been happily depending on Keap (formerly Infusionsoft) to meet all my customer management and automation demands.
I found Keap intuitive to make use of and it dealt with every little thing I needed– CRM, e-mail marketing, sales funnels, subscription sites, and client support.
Keap’s CRM and sales and marketing automation are designed to aid small businesses maintain their clients while adding brand-new ones easily. Automate follow-ups with emails and texts, making certain leads and customers receive the appropriate messages at the right time. Usage site and social media sites types to simplify lead follow-up, and handle your growth with very easy consultation scheduling and lead monitoring. Boost sales with automated quoting, invoicing, and payment processing, liberating your time. With Keap, small businesses can conserve 10 hours per week and rise profits by 39%. Begin with a 14-day free trial, no credit card needed.
Why we like Keap
Keap provides a detailed customer connection administration (CRM) and marketing automation service customized for small businesses and entrepreneurs. We appreciate Keap’s concentrate on enhancing sales processes and nurturing client partnerships with effective automation tools. The system’s all-in-one approach incorporates CRM, e-mail marketing, invoicing, and job management, making it particularly attractive for organizations looking to settle their tech pile.
For the most part, it just worked dependably with very little difficulty or maintenance needed. My open and click-through rates were excellent (like 35% fantastic). Automations ran efficiently without any concerns.
So why in the world was I attracted to uproot my whole functional structure from a system that worked to try something unproven and untried?
In knowledge I can admit I obtained attracted by the siren phone call of “glossy things disorder”. You recognize the sensation: when everybody’s talking about a brand-new device that will certainly reinvent your service … The yard often looks greener beyond, and I wondered whether GoHighLevel may lower rubbing factors that I ‘d discovered to tolerate throughout the years with Keap.
I resisted initially, but a few more aggravations led me to think possibly it was time for a modification.
The Investment: Migrating My Firm to GoHighLevel
Earlier this year I chose to start. I enrolled in HighLevel’s Firm plan at $297/month, investing considerably more than the $97/month starter price.
This wasn’t a choice I took lightly. I understood switching over systems was going to require migrating all my Keap data and essentially reconstructing my whole tech framework from the ground up using all of the GoHighLevel integrations readily available.
Below’s an introduction of just some of the effort called for:
- Manually exporting 20,000+ email subscriber documents
- Recreating dozens of automations and workflows
- Relocating customer profiles, notes, and job data to the new CRM
- Reconfiguring my Stripe billing integration
- Setting up landing pages, discounts, and sales funnels throughout again
- Learning an entirely foreign UX and interface style
Done in, I spent around 30-40 tiresome hours of arrangement job transitioning every little thing over– not to mention managing lost efficiency during the switch.
Yet inevitably, it was a calculated financial investment I agreed to make. I figured some short-term pain would repay with GoHighLevel offering a better lasting option for my business, Dripify. Oh just how wrong I was …
It only took me concerning a month of hands-on use to recognize I had made a big error. The problems started piling up promptly, till it reached a factor I needed to cut my losses and change back to Keap completely.
Allow’s go through the nightmarish troubles I came across.
Security Issues & Several Vermin
Given GoHighLevel placed itself as an all-in-one automation system, I took care to meticulously recreate each and every single workflow from my old Keap account.
These consisted of sequences for onboarding brand-new email subscribers, onboarding new customers, automating follow-ups for webinar enrollments, sending occasion pointers, taking care of membership expirations and much more.
Every little thing seemed to be functioning fine … up until all of a sudden it had not been. One early morning, I woke up to locate 171 entirely irrelevant e-mails had actually been sent out to customers that need to NOT have actually obtained them. This happened three days in a row, with a various set of 160 individuals daily.
I hysterically attempted troubleshooting and rebuilding the automation from scratch. However the problem lingered.
When I seriously reached out to their support group, they slightly declared “web server concerns” were responsible. But this description really did not make any type of feeling, considering that the errors continued occurring each morning like clockwork unassociated to any type of downtime.
In my mind, this enormous failing was completely unacceptable and simply really did not help my business. I have thousands of contacts counting on my automated campaigns running efficiently.
So if GoHighLevel was going to be absolutely undependable, just how could I delegate mission-critical workflows and delicate client data to their modern technology?
The unintuitive user interface just compounded these problems …
Irritating UX
Coming from Keap where whatever was seamless and intuitive, GoHighLevel’s learning contour really felt high and complicated.
Straightforward jobs like editing and enhancing workflows entailed excavating with menu systems that were all over the place. Trick settings were unexplainably scattered in completely different areas. Relocating between features really felt disjointed or complicated.
I’ll tell you what I imply by talking about their funnel builder as an instance. There were 3 different setups panels to take care of total, individual, and product configurations. Yet for some insane reason, the links to access each of these core setups were expanded on contrary sides of the screen. What!?
As a person who values tidy, thoughtful design, this seriously upset me.
It reinforced that GoHighLevel still felt like a work-in-progress as opposed to a polished product ready for prime-time usage. Their concerns seemed concentrated on packing in every feature under the sun, with bad usability as a second thought.
And talking features, I quickly understood the small cost tag came with pricey concessions …
Misleading Pricing GoHighLevel SaaS Blueprint
Among GoHighLevel’s biggest marketing points is the inexpensive rate for access to so many features. However I quickly discovered this economical base cost was deceptive.
They nickle-and-dimed customers with erratic costs for core functionality. Instantly my charge card statements had unclear $10 charges from GoHighLevel here and there.
As it ended up, you obtain charged every single time you send an email 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 extra for deliverability add-ons like Mailgun, my “economical” GoHighLevel subscription ended up costing dramatically greater than my Keap plan.
The reduced price tag was alluring, however simply not reasonable in practice. This bait-and-switch left a negative preference in my mouth.
Email Rates Suffered
The final dealbreaker was seeing my thoroughly nurtured email open prices plunge nearly over night after changing to GoHighLevel.
Previously, my audience interaction regularly struck 35-40% open rates in Keap month after month. Once I migrated their records over to GoHighLevel, efficiency tanked instantly to a worthless 9% open price.
No matter how much I maximized my sending out techniques or attempted every repairing method, I could barely push open rates back right into the teenagers– still a 50%+ decrease from my previous criteria GoHighLevel SaaS Blueprint.
Let me repeat: my exact same target market and e-mails all of a sudden had horrible engagement. The only point I might believe that would be triggering this was whatever was taking place behind the scenes at GoHighLevel. For a company so depending on e-mail marketing, this was a big deal.
In between the crippling deliverability issues, concealed fees, busted features, and dreadful user interface, I had actually finally reached my restriction …
Why I Quit GoHighLevel after 37 Days
Just 45 days after moving my company to GoHighLevel, I recognized I had made a massive error. The disadvantages significantly outweighed any advantages.
No software program is excellent, however the large quantity of issues was beyond appropriate.
At the end of the day, software program comes down to count on. If I can not trust it to handle vital features effectively or believe a vendor has my best interests in mind, after that it’s time to leave– even after investing substantial time, cash, and effort moving.
So I made the difficult call to turn around program and return back to Keap totally just weeks after going all in on GoHighLevel. Allow’s discover what I gained from this debacle.
Trick Takeaways: What I Picked up from My GoHighLevel Mistake
My time with HighLevel can be summarized as an expensive misadventure. However in knowledge, it taught me a couple of key lessons:
- Stay with what works. Do not disturb what’s functioning unless something is definitively better across the board. Adjustment brings danger.
- Veterinarian asserts thoroughly. Marketing hype around brand-new software usually obscures bigger underlying imperfections. Deep due diligence is essential.
- Choose simplicity over features. Properly designed tools need to make your work life much easier, not a lot more complicated and unpleasant.
- Openness constructs depend on. Opaque pricing, dubious reseller terms, and finger-pointing to escape troubles destroys trust fund.
- Look for honest reviews. Happy assistance assesses imply much less if extreme issues indicate poor overall functionality.
- Excellence is impossible. No single service can perfectly satisfy every special organization need. Discover the least-bad fit.
- Advancement over revolution. Step-by-step enhancements usually exceed high-risk wholesale reinvention of what currently works penalty.
Basically, I discovered to be more skeptical of “also good to be true” marketing insurance claims and much less lured by the appeal of shiny new things. The tools you use daily need to make trust with openness and efficiency, not glossy advertising.