As an agency proprietor for over a years, I count on software application and automation to simplify operations and supply outcomes. So when GoHighLevel emerged on the scene few years back, it certainly caught my attention GoHighLevel SaaSPRENEUR Workshop.
The concept was attractive– an all-in-one client administration system with marketing, sales, and solution devices incorporated with each other. As a business owner constantly seeking to streamline and scale my business, it appeared like a dream happened on paper. That wouldn’t want a single solution that does it all?
Yet in this in-depth GoHighLevel evaluation, I’ll take you inside my disastrous trip of attempting (and failing) to switch over to this prominent brand-new software. You’ll find out:
If you’re taking into consideration whether GoHighLevel is right for your own business demands, hopefully you can learn from my painful blunders and blew up expectations.
Looter: I do NOT suggest GoHighLevel. If you need a CRM, start with this checklist of ideal CRMs instead. I use Keap.
Some GoHighLevel Alternatives
If you’re looking for a sales, marketing, and task administration option to GoHighLevel, then right here are a few we advise.
Backstory: Why I Took Into Consideration Switching Over from Keap
To comprehend what attracted me to GoHighLevel in the first place, you require context about my previous arrangement. For over 5 years I had been gladly relying on Keap (formerly Infusionsoft) to meet all my customer management and automation needs.
I discovered Keap user-friendly to use and it handled whatever I required– CRM, e-mail marketing, sales funnels, membership sites, and customer assistance.
Keap’s CRM and sales and marketing automation are developed to help small companies keep their clients while adding new ones effortlessly. Automate follow-ups with e-mails and messages, guaranteeing leads and customers get the appropriate messages at the right time. Use website and social media forms to enhance lead follow-up, and manage your growth with simple visit scheduling and lead monitoring. Boost sales with automated quoting, invoicing, and payment handling, liberating your time. With Keap, small companies can save 10 hours per week and increase revenue by 39%. Start with a 14-day free trial, no credit card required.
Why we like Keap
Keap supplies a comprehensive customer relationship monitoring (CRM) and marketing automation remedy customized for small businesses and entrepreneurs. We value Keap’s focus on enhancing sales procedures and supporting consumer connections with effective automation tools. The system’s all-in-one method integrates CRM, e-mail marketing, invoicing, and task management, making it especially attractive for organizations aiming to settle their tech stack.
Essentially, it just worked reliably with minimal hassle or maintenance needed. My open and click-through prices were wonderful (like 35% wonderful). Automations ran smoothly without issues.
So why in the world was I lured to uproot my entire operational structure from a system that functioned to try something unverified and untried?
In knowledge I can confess I got seduced by the alarm call of “shiny item disorder”. You understand the sensation: when every person’s discussing a brand-new tool that will revolutionize your service … The turf commonly looks greener beyond, and I wondered whether GoHighLevel could lower friction points that I ‘d discovered to endure throughout the years with Keap.
I resisted initially, but a couple of even more aggravations led me to think perhaps it was time for an adjustment.
The Financial investment: Moving My Firm to GoHighLevel
Earlier this year I determined to take the plunge. I enrolled in HighLevel’s Firm plan at $297/month, spending dramatically more than the $97/month starter price.
This had not been a decision I ignored. I recognized switching over systems was mosting likely to require moving all my Keap information and essentially restoring my entire technology framework from the ground up using every one of the GoHighLevel integrations readily available.
Right here’s an introduction of simply some of the initiative needed:
- By hand exporting 20,000+ email customer documents
- Recreating loads of automations and workflows
- Moving client profiles, notes, and project data to the brand-new CRM
- Reconfiguring my Stripe billing integration
- Setting up landing pages, promos, and sales funnels around once more
- Learning an entirely foreign UX and interface layout
Done in, I spent around 30-40 laborious hours of configuration job transitioning whatever over– and also dealing with shed productivity during the switch.
However inevitably, it was a computed investment I wanted to make. I figured some short-term discomfort would repay with GoHighLevel providing a better lasting service for my organization, Dripify. Oh just how incorrect I was …
It only took me concerning a month of hands-on use to realize I had actually made a big error. The concerns began piling up quickly, till it got to a point I needed to reduce my losses and change back to Keap totally.
Let’s go through the horrible troubles I ran into.
Security Issues & Several Vermin
Provided GoHighLevel placed itself as an all-in-one automation platform, I made sure to meticulously recreate every workflow from my old Keap account.
These included series for onboarding new email subscribers, onboarding new customers, automating follow-ups for webinar registrations, sending event reminders, handling subscription expiries and a lot more.
Whatever seemed to be functioning fine … till suddenly it had not been. One morning, I woke up to discover 171 totally unimportant e-mails had actually been sent out to individuals that ought to NOT have received them. This happened 3 days in a row, with a different set of 160 people daily.
I desperately attempted troubleshooting and reconstructing the automation from the ground up. Yet the problem lingered.
When I seriously reached out to their assistance group, they vaguely declared “web server concerns” were at fault. However this description didn’t make any type of feeling, because the errors continued happening each early morning like clockwork unassociated to any downtime.
In my mind, this enormous failing was completely inappropriate and simply really did not benefit my company. I have thousands of get in touches with counting on my automated campaigns running efficiently.
So if GoHighLevel was mosting likely to be entirely unreliable, just how could I delegate mission-critical workflows and delicate client data to their modern technology?
The unintuitive interface only compounded these concerns …
Frustrating UX
Coming from Keap where every little thing was seamless and user-friendly, GoHighLevel’s learning curve felt high and challenging.
Simple jobs like modifying workflows included digging through food selection systems that were all over the place. Secret settings were unexplainably scattered in totally various sections. Relocating in between functions really felt disjointed or confusing.
I’ll inform you what I suggest by talking about their funnel builder as an instance. There were 3 separate setups panels to manage overall, specific, and item setups. Yet for some crazy factor, the links to gain access to each of these core settings were spread out on opposite sides of the display. What!?
As someone that values clean, thoughtful design, this seriously irritated me.
It reinforced that GoHighLevel still seemed like a work-in-progress instead of a sleek item prepared for prime-time usage. Their concerns appeared focused on cramming in every feature under the sun, with inadequate usability as an afterthought.
And talking features, I quickly recognized the affordable price tag featured expensive concessions …
Misleading Pricing GoHighLevel SaaSPRENEUR Workshop
One of GoHighLevel’s greatest marketing factors is the affordable rate for access to numerous features. Yet I quickly learned this affordable base expense was misleading.
They nickle-and-dimed individuals with erratic fees for core performance. Unexpectedly my charge card statements had vague $10 fees from GoHighLevel here and there.
As it ended up, you get charged whenever you send an e-mail via their web servers. So for high volume customers, this added up to numerous dollars in unexpected expenses.
Between these per-email charges and paying extra for deliverability add-ons like Mailgun, my “budget friendly” GoHighLevel subscription ended up setting you back significantly MORE than my Keap plan.
The reduced price tag was appealing, however simply not realistic in practice. This bait-and-switch left a poor preference in my mouth.
Email Rates Suffered
The last dealbreaker was seeing my very carefully nurtured email open prices plunge nearly overnight after switching to GoHighLevel.
Previously, my audience involvement consistently struck 35-40% open prices in Keap month after month. But once I moved their documents over to GoHighLevel, efficiency tanked immediately to a useless 9% open price.
No matter just how much I maximized my sending out methods or attempted every fixing method, I could hardly push open prices back into the teenagers– still a 50%+ decrease from my previous standards GoHighLevel SaaSPRENEUR Workshop.
Let me repeat: my exact same target market and emails unexpectedly had awful engagement. The only point I can believe that would certainly be triggering this was whatever was happening behind the scenes at GoHighLevel. For a company so depending on email marketing, this was a big deal.
In between the crippling deliverability problems, concealed costs, busted features, and dreadful user interface, I had actually ultimately reached my restriction …
Why I Quit GoHighLevel after 37 Days
Simply 45 days after migrating my firm to GoHighLevel, I knew I had actually made a substantial error. The disadvantages dramatically outweighed any benefits.
No software program is perfect, but the sheer volume of problems was past acceptable.
At the end of the day, software program comes down to count on. If I can not trust it to manage crucial features properly or think a supplier has my best interests in mind, then it’s time to leave– even after investing substantial time, cash, and initiative moving.
So I made the hard call to turn around course and return back to Keap totally simply weeks after going done in on GoHighLevel. Let’s explore what I learned from this fiasco.
Trick Takeaways: What I Gained from My GoHighLevel Error
My time with HighLevel can be summed up as a costly ill fortune. But in hindsight, it taught me a few key lessons:
- Stick to what jobs. Don’t upset what’s working unless something is definitively better across the board. Change brings risk.
- Vet claims extensively. Marketing hype around brand-new software application frequently obscures larger underlying problems. Deep due diligence is crucial.
- Select simpleness over features. Well-designed tools should make your job life less complicated, not much more difficult and unpleasant.
- Transparency develops trust fund. Opaque pricing, unethical reseller terms, and finger-pointing to escape issues destroys depend on.
- Look for objective evaluations. Delighted support examines suggest less if extreme issues suggest poor general functionality.
- Excellence is difficult. No solitary solution can completely satisfy every one-of-a-kind business need. Locate the least-bad fit.
- Advancement over change. Incremental enhancements typically surpass dangerous wholesale reinvention of what already works penalty.
Basically, I learned to be more cynical of “as well great to be true” marketing cases and much less attracted by the appeal of glossy brand-new items. The tools you use daily ought to earn trust fund with openness and efficiency, not glossy advertising.