As an agency proprietor for over a decade, I rely upon software application and automation to improve procedures and supply outcomes. So when GoHighLevel emerged on the scene few years back, it absolutely captured my attention GoHighLevel Services.
The concept was enticing– an all-in-one client administration platform with marketing, sales, and solution devices incorporated with each other. As a business owner constantly wanting to simplify and scale my company, it looked like a dream happened on paper. Who would not want a solitary option that does it all?
However in this thorough GoHighLevel testimonial, I’ll take you inside my disastrous journey of attempting (and stopping working) to switch to this popular brand-new software application. You’ll learn:
If you’re taking into consideration whether GoHighLevel is right for your very own company demands, ideally you can pick up from my unpleasant errors and blew up expectations.
Spoiler: 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 searching for a sales, marketing, and job monitoring choice to GoHighLevel, after that here are a couple of we suggest.
Backstory: Why I Took Into Consideration Switching from Keap
To recognize what attracted me to GoHighLevel in the first place, you need context about my previous configuration. For over 5 years I had actually been happily relying on Keap (previously Infusionsoft) to meet all my customer monitoring and automation requirements.
I found Keap intuitive to make use of and it dealt with whatever I needed– CRM, e-mail marketing, sales funnels, membership websites, and customer assistance.
Keap’s CRM and sales and marketing automation are made to help small businesses keep their clients while including new ones easily. Automate follow-ups with emails and messages, making sure leads and customers obtain the best messages at the correct time. Usage website and social networks forms to improve lead follow-up, and manage your development with easy consultation scheduling and lead monitoring. Boost sales with automated pricing quote, invoicing, and settlement handling, maximizing your time. With Keap, small companies can save 10 hours each week and rise earnings by 39%. Begin with a 14-day free trial, no credit card called for.
Why we like Keap
Keap provides a comprehensive customer relationship monitoring (CRM) and marketing automation option customized for small businesses and business owners. We appreciate Keap’s focus on simplifying sales procedures and supporting client partnerships through powerful automation devices. The platform’s all-in-one technique integrates CRM, e-mail marketing, invoicing, and job management, making it specifically appealing for services seeking to combine their tech pile.
For the most part, it simply functioned reliably with marginal fuss or maintenance required. My open and click-through prices were terrific (like 35% great). Automations ran smoothly with no problems.
So why on earth was I attracted to uproot my entire functional structure from a system that worked to attempt something unverified and untested?
In knowledge I can confess I obtained attracted by the alarm call of “glossy item syndrome”. You know the sensation: when every person’s talking about a new device that will revolutionize your organization … The turf typically looks greener beyond, and I wondered whether GoHighLevel may decrease friction points that I would certainly discovered to tolerate over the years with Keap.
I stood up to initially, but a couple of more frustrations led me to think perhaps it was time for a change.
The Investment: Migrating My Firm to GoHighLevel
Previously this year I determined to start. I registered for HighLevel’s Agency plan at $297/month, investing significantly more than the $97/month starter expense.
This had not been a choice I took lightly. I recognized switching platforms was mosting likely to call for migrating all my Keap data and basically rebuilding my entire technology infrastructure from square one using all of the GoHighLevel integrations readily available.
Here’s a summary of simply some of the initiative needed:
- By hand exporting 20,000+ email customer records
- Recreating loads of automations and workflows
- Relocating customer accounts, notes, and project information to the brand-new CRM
- Reconfiguring my Stripe invoicing integration
- Establishing landing pages, coupons, and sales funnels throughout again
- Learning a completely foreign UX and user interface layout
All in, I spent around 30-40 tedious hours of arrangement work transitioning every little thing over– as well as dealing with shed performance throughout the switch.
However ultimately, it was a calculated financial investment I wanted to make. I figured some short-term pain would settle with GoHighLevel giving a much better long-term service for my service, Dripify. Oh how wrong I was …
It just took me concerning a month of hands-on use to understand I had actually made a huge mistake. The problems began piling up rapidly, till it reached a point I needed to reduce my losses and switch over back to Keap entirely.
Allow’s go through the nightmarish issues I experienced.
Protection Issues & Several Bugs
Offered GoHighLevel positioned itself as an all-in-one automation system, I made sure to thoroughly recreate each and every single workflow from my old Keap account.
These included series for onboarding new email customers, onboarding new clients, automating follow-ups for webinar enrollments, sending occasion suggestions, managing membership expiries and far more.
Whatever appeared to be operating fine … up until unexpectedly it had not been. One morning, I woke up to discover 171 completely irrelevant e-mails had been sent to users that should NOT have actually received them. This occurred three days straight, with a various batch of 160 individuals each day.
I anxiously tried fixing and restoring the automation from square one. However the problem persisted.
When I seriously connected to their assistance group, they slightly declared “web server issues” were at fault. Yet this explanation didn’t make any kind of sense, considering that the mistakes continued happening each early morning like clockwork unassociated to any downtime.
In my mind, this large failing was totally inappropriate and simply really did not help my business. I have hundreds of contacts counting on my automated campaigns running efficiently.
So if GoHighLevel was mosting likely to be totally unstable, just how could I turn over mission-critical workflows and sensitive client data to their modern technology?
The unintuitive user interface just intensified these problems …
Discouraging UX
Coming from Keap where every little thing was seamless and intuitive, GoHighLevel’s learning curve really felt high and difficult.
Straightforward jobs like modifying workflows involved digging through menu systems that were all over the place. Secret settings were unexplainably scattered in totally different sections. Relocating in between features felt disjointed or complex.
I’ll tell you what I indicate by talking about their funnel builder as an example. There were 3 different settings panels to manage overall, specific, and item setups. Yet for some insane reason, the links to gain access to each of these core setups were expanded on contrary sides of the display. What!?
As someone who values clean, thoughtful style, this seriously upset me.
It enhanced that GoHighLevel still felt like a work-in-progress instead of a refined item ready for prime-time usage. Their top priorities appeared concentrated on stuffing in every feature imaginable, with inadequate use as a second thought.
And talking features, I quickly understood the affordable price tag came with costly compromises …
Misleading Pricing GoHighLevel Services
Among GoHighLevel’s largest selling points is the inexpensive price for access to many features. However I quickly learned this low-cost base expense was deceptive.
They nickle-and-dimed users with occasional charges for core performance. Suddenly my bank card statements had unclear $10 costs from GoHighLevel here and there.
As it turned out, you get charged each time you send out an e-mail via their servers. So for high volume customers, this added up to thousands of dollars in unanticipated expenses.
Between these per-email fees and paying additional for deliverability attachments like Mailgun, my “budget friendly” GoHighLevel subscription wound up setting you back dramatically MORE than my Keap plan.
The low sticker price was appealing, but just not sensible in practice. This bait-and-switch left a bad preference in my mouth.
Email Rates Suffered
The last dealbreaker was seeing my very carefully supported e-mail open rates plummet almost over night after switching over to GoHighLevel.
Formerly, my audience involvement consistently struck 35-40% open rates in Keap month after month. Once I migrated their records over to GoHighLevel, efficiency tanked instantaneously to a worthless 9% open price.
Despite how much I maximized my sending methods or tried every fixing method, I can barely push open prices back right into the teenagers– still a 50%+ decline from my previous benchmarks GoHighLevel Services.
Let me repeat: my exact same audience and emails suddenly had dreadful involvement. The only thing I could think that would be triggering this was whatever was happening behind the scenes at GoHighLevel. For an agency so depending on email marketing, this was a big deal.
In between the debilitating deliverability problems, concealed charges, broken features, and awful user interface, I had actually ultimately reached my restriction …
Why I Stop GoHighLevel after 37 Days
Simply 45 days after migrating my agency to GoHighLevel, I recognized I had actually made a substantial mistake. The cons drastically surpassed any type of benefits.
No software is best, yet the large quantity of problems was past acceptable.
At the end of the day, software program comes down to trust. If I can’t trust it to deal with important features properly or think a vendor has my best interests in mind, after that it’s time to leave– also after investing substantial time, money, and initiative moving.
So I made the challenging phone call to turn around program and return back to Keap totally simply weeks after going all in on GoHighLevel. Let’s discover what I learned from this debacle.
Trick Takeaways: What I Gained from My GoHighLevel Mistake
My time with HighLevel can be summarized as a costly misadventure. However in hindsight, it showed me a couple of vital lessons:
- Adhere to what jobs. Do not disturb what’s functioning unless something is definitively better across the board. Modification brings threat.
- Veterinarian claims thoroughly. Marketing buzz around brand-new software application commonly covers larger underlying problems. Deep due diligence is essential.
- Choose simplicity over features. Well-designed tools must make your job life much easier, not a lot more difficult and unpleasant.
- Openness constructs trust. Nontransparent pricing, dubious reseller terms, and finger-pointing to avert issues destroys trust fund.
- Look for objective evaluations. Satisfied support assesses imply less if extreme concerns imply poor total use.
- Perfection is difficult. No single option can completely satisfy every one-of-a-kind company requirement. Locate the least-bad fit.
- Development over change. Step-by-step improvements commonly surpass dangerous wholesale reinvention of what currently works fine.
Basically, I learned to be extra skeptical of “too great to be real” marketing claims and less attracted by the allure of glossy brand-new items. The tools you use daily should earn depend on with transparency and efficiency, not glossy advertising.