As a firm proprietor for over a decade, I rely upon software application and automation to simplify operations and deliver results. So when GoHighLevel emerged on the scene few years back, it most definitely captured my interest GoHighLevel SaaS FastTrack Program.
The concept was appealing– an all-in-one customer management system with marketing, sales, and service devices integrated with each other. As an entrepreneur always looking to streamline and scale my business, it appeared like a dream happened on paper. Who wouldn’t want a single solution that does it all?
Yet in this thorough GoHighLevel evaluation, I’ll take you inside my tragic journey of trying (and stopping working) to switch to this preferred new software. You’ll discover:
If you’re thinking about whether GoHighLevel is right for your own organization requirements, with any luck you can gain from my unpleasant blunders and blew up expectations.
Looter: I do NOT advise GoHighLevel. If you need a CRM, begin with this checklist of best CRMs rather. I make use of Keap.
Some GoHighLevel Alternatives
If you’re trying to find a sales, marketing, and project monitoring choice to GoHighLevel, after that right here are a couple of we suggest.
Backstory: Why I Took Into Consideration Changing from Keap
To understand what attracted me to GoHighLevel in the first place, you need context concerning my previous arrangement. For over 5 years I had actually been gladly relying on Keap (formerly Infusionsoft) to satisfy all my customer management and automation demands.
I found Keap user-friendly to utilize and it handled whatever I required– CRM, e-mail marketing, sales funnels, membership sites, and client assistance.
Keap’s CRM and sales and marketing automation are made to aid small companies keep their customers while including new ones easily. Automate follow-ups with emails and texts, guaranteeing leads and clients obtain the appropriate messages at the right time. Usage internet site and social media kinds to streamline lead follow-up, and manage your development with easy appointment organizing and lead monitoring. Boost sales with automated pricing quote, invoicing, and settlement handling, maximizing your time. With Keap, small businesses can save 10 hours each week and boost income by 39%. Beginning with a 14-day free trial, no credit card needed.
Why we like Keap
Keap offers a thorough consumer relationship administration (CRM) and marketing automation solution tailored for local business and entrepreneurs. We appreciate Keap’s focus on enhancing sales processes and supporting consumer partnerships through powerful automation tools. The platform’s all-in-one approach combines CRM, email marketing, invoicing, and job management, making it especially eye-catching for organizations seeking to consolidate their tech pile.
Generally, it simply functioned accurately with marginal difficulty or upkeep called for. My open and click-through prices were excellent (like 35% excellent). Automations ran efficiently with no problems.
So why on earth was I attracted to uproot my whole operational structure from a system that functioned to attempt something unverified and untried?
In hindsight I can admit I got attracted by the siren call of “shiny object disorder”. You know the feeling: when everybody’s speaking about a brand-new tool that will reinvent your business … The turf commonly looks greener on the other side, and I wondered whether GoHighLevel may decrease rubbing factors that I ‘d learned to tolerate over the years with Keap.
I withstood in the beginning, yet a couple of even more disappointments led me to believe maybe it was time for a change.
The Investment: Migrating My Firm to GoHighLevel
Previously this year I made a decision to take the plunge. I enrolled in HighLevel’s Firm plan at $297/month, spending considerably more than the $97/month starter expense.
This wasn’t a choice I ignored. I recognized switching systems was going to call for migrating all my Keap information and essentially restoring my whole technology infrastructure from scratch making use of all of the GoHighLevel integrations readily available.
Below’s a summary of just a few of the initiative required:
- By hand exporting 20,000+ email customer records
- Recreating lots of automations and workflows
- Moving client profiles, notes, and task data to the brand-new CRM
- Reconfiguring my Stripe billing integration
- Setting up landing pages, coupons, and sales funnels around again
- Learning a totally international UX and user interface style
All in, I invested around 30-40 tiresome hours of configuration work transitioning everything over– as well as taking care of shed efficiency during the switch.
However eventually, it was a calculated investment I wanted to make. I figured some short-term pain would pay off with GoHighLevel providing a better lasting solution for my company, Dripify. Oh how incorrect I was …
It just took me about a month of hands-on use to realize I had made a huge mistake. The concerns started accumulating swiftly, until it reached a factor I needed to reduce my losses and switch over back to Keap entirely.
Let’s walk through the nightmarish troubles I experienced.
Safety Issues & Numerous Vermin
Given GoHighLevel positioned itself as an all-in-one automation platform, I took care to thoroughly recreate every single workflow from my old Keap account.
These consisted of series for onboarding brand-new e-mail customers, onboarding brand-new customers, automating follow-ups for webinar enrollments, sending out event reminders, taking care of subscription expirations and a lot more.
Every little thing seemed to be functioning penalty … till instantly it wasn’t. One morning, I woke up to discover 171 totally unimportant emails had actually been sent out to customers who ought to NOT have obtained them. This happened 3 days straight, with a different batch of 160 individuals daily.
I hysterically tried fixing and reconstructing the automation from square one. But the problem continued.
When I desperately reached out to their support group, they vaguely claimed “web server issues” were to blame. However this description really did not make any type of feeling, since the mistakes continued happening each morning like clockwork unrelated to any kind of downtime.
In my mind, this substantial failure was totally inappropriate and simply didn’t help my organization. I have countless contacts depending on my automated campaigns running efficiently.
So if GoHighLevel was going to be entirely unreliable, just how could I turn over mission-critical workflows and sensitive customer data to their technology?
The unintuitive interface just compounded these issues …
Aggravating UX
Coming from Keap where every little thing was seamless and instinctive, GoHighLevel’s learning curve really felt high and challenging.
Simple jobs like modifying workflows involved excavating through food selection systems that were all over the place. Trick settings were unexplainably spread in completely different areas. Relocating between features felt disjointed or complicated.
I’ll tell you what I mean by discussing their funnel builder as an instance. There were 3 separate settings panels to take care of overall, specific, and item configurations. Yet for some insane factor, the links to access each of these core setups were expanded on opposite sides of the display. What!?
As a person that values tidy, thoughtful style, this seriously annoyed me.
It strengthened that GoHighLevel still felt like a work-in-progress rather than a polished product ready for prime-time use. Their priorities seemed focused on stuffing in every feature under the sun, with inadequate usability as a second thought.
And talking features, I soon realized the low price tag included costly compromises …
Deceptive Pricing GoHighLevel SaaS FastTrack Program
Among GoHighLevel’s largest selling factors is the budget-friendly rate for access to a lot of features. Yet I swiftly discovered this low-cost base expense was deceitful.
They nickle-and-dimed individuals with erratic costs for core performance. Unexpectedly my bank card declarations had obscure $10 fees from GoHighLevel occasionally.
As it turned out, you obtain charged every time you send 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 costs and paying extra for deliverability add-ons like Mailgun, my “cost effective” GoHighLevel membership ended up costing dramatically MORE than my Keap plan.
The low price tag was appealing, yet just not realistic in practice. This bait-and-switch left a poor taste in my mouth.
Email Rates Suffered
The last dealbreaker was seeing my meticulously supported e-mail open prices drop nearly over night after switching over to GoHighLevel.
Formerly, my target market engagement consistently hit 35-40% open prices in Keap month after month. But once I moved their records over to GoHighLevel, performance tanked immediately to a useless 9% open rate.
Regardless of just how much I enhanced my sending out practices or attempted every fixing method, I might hardly push open rates back into the teenagers– still a 50%+ decline from my previous criteria GoHighLevel SaaS FastTrack Program.
Let me repeat: my exact same audience and emails all of a sudden had horrible interaction. The only point I can believe that would be creating this was whatever was taking place behind the scenes at GoHighLevel. For a firm so depending on email marketing, this was a big deal.
In between the debilitating deliverability problems, hidden fees, broken features, and awful user interface, I had actually lastly reached my restriction …
Why I Give up GoHighLevel after 37 Days
Simply 45 days after moving my agency to GoHighLevel, I recognized I had actually made a huge error. The disadvantages significantly surpassed any benefits.
No software application is best, yet the large volume of issues was past acceptable.
At the end of the day, software application boils down to trust. If I can not trust it to manage crucial features effectively or believe a supplier has my best interests in mind, after that it’s time to leave– also after spending substantial time, money, and initiative moving.
So I made the tough contact us to reverse course and return back to Keap completely just weeks after going all in on GoHighLevel. Let’s explore what I learned from this debacle.
Trick Takeaways: What I Gained from My GoHighLevel Error
My time with HighLevel can be summed up as an expensive ill fortune. Yet in knowledge, it instructed me a couple of crucial lessons:
- Adhere to what jobs. Don’t distress what’s functioning unless something is definitively better across the board. Adjustment brings threat.
- Vet claims completely. Marketing hype around brand-new software application usually covers larger underlying imperfections. Deep due diligence is vital.
- Choose simpleness over features. Properly designed devices need to make your job life simpler, not much more complicated and messy.
- Openness develops depend on. Opaque pricing, unethical reseller terms, and finger-pointing to avert troubles ruins count on.
- Look for impartial evaluations. Pleased support reviews mean much less if extreme issues suggest inadequate general functionality.
- Excellence is impossible. No solitary remedy can perfectly satisfy every unique business need. Locate the least-bad fit.
- Development over change. Step-by-step renovations generally outweigh high-risk wholesale reinvention of what already functions penalty.
Simply put, I learned to be much more skeptical of “as well good to be true” marketing claims and much less lured by the attraction of glossy brand-new items. The devices you use daily must gain depend on with openness and performance, not slick advertising.