As an agency owner for over a decade, I rely upon software program and automation to improve operations and deliver results. So when GoHighLevel arised on the scene couple of years back, it certainly caught my interest GoHighLevel Training.
The idea was appealing– an all-in-one customer administration platform with marketing, sales, and service tools incorporated with each other. As a business owner constantly wanting to streamline and scale my business, it looked like a dream come true on paper. Who would not desire a solitary remedy that does it all?
But in this thorough GoHighLevel review, I’ll take you inside my devastating trip of trying (and falling short) to switch over to this preferred new software program. You’ll learn:
If you’re taking into consideration whether GoHighLevel is right for your own company needs, hopefully you can gain from my unpleasant mistakes and inflated expectations.
Spoiler: I do NOT advise GoHighLevel. If you require a CRM, begin with this listing of ideal CRMs instead. I utilize Keap.
Some GoHighLevel Alternatives
If you’re seeking a sales, marketing, and project monitoring option to GoHighLevel, then below are a couple of we recommend.
Backstory: Why I Considered Switching 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 gladly counting on Keap (formerly Infusionsoft) to meet all my client monitoring and automation needs.
I found Keap intuitive to use and it dealt with whatever I required– CRM, e-mail marketing, sales funnels, subscription sites, and client assistance.
Keap’s CRM and sales and marketing automation are designed to aid local business maintain their customers while adding brand-new ones easily. Automate follow-ups with emails and texts, making certain leads and clients obtain the best messages at the right time. Usage site and social networks types to improve lead follow-up, and handle your growth with simple consultation scheduling and lead tracking. Boost sales with automated quoting, invoicing, and settlement processing, freeing up your time. With Keap, small businesses can save 10 hours per week and boost income by 39%. Start with a 14-day free trial, no bank card required.
Why we like Keap
Keap offers a detailed consumer relationship monitoring (CRM) and marketing automation option tailored for small companies and entrepreneurs. We value Keap’s concentrate on simplifying sales procedures and nurturing customer partnerships with effective automation tools. The platform’s all-in-one method combines CRM, email marketing, invoicing, and job management, making it especially appealing for services aiming to settle their technology pile.
Essentially, it simply functioned dependably with marginal hassle or upkeep needed. My open and click-through prices were wonderful (like 35% excellent). Automations ran smoothly without any problems.
So why in the world was I attracted to uproot my whole functional foundation from a system that worked to try something unverified and untested?
In knowledge I can confess I got seduced by the siren telephone call of “glossy item syndrome”. You understand the sensation: when everybody’s discussing a new tool that will certainly reinvent your business … The grass commonly looks greener beyond, and I wondered whether GoHighLevel could decrease friction points that I would certainly learned to tolerate over the years with Keap.
I stood up to at first, however a few even more disappointments led me to believe maybe it was time for a modification.
The Financial investment: Migrating My Agency to GoHighLevel
Earlier this year I determined to start. I signed up for HighLevel’s Agency plan at $297/month, spending substantially greater than the $97/month starter expense.
This wasn’t a decision I took lightly. I recognized changing systems was going to require moving all my Keap information and essentially reconstructing my whole technology framework from scratch using all of the GoHighLevel integrations available.
Below’s an overview of simply some of the effort needed:
- By hand exporting 20,000+ email client documents
- Recreating lots of automations and workflows
- Relocating customer accounts, notes, and project information to the brand-new CRM
- Reconfiguring my Stripe invoicing integration
- Setting up landing pages, discounts, and sales funnels throughout once more
- Learning a completely international UX and interface design
All in, I spent around 30-40 tedious hours of setup job transitioning everything over– not to mention handling lost efficiency during the switch.
Yet eventually, it was a calculated financial investment I was willing to make. I figured some temporary pain would certainly pay off with GoHighLevel supplying a much better lasting service for my organization, Dripify. Oh how incorrect I was …
It only took me concerning a month of hands-on usage to recognize I had made a big error. The concerns began piling up promptly, until it got to a point I had to cut my losses and switch back to Keap completely.
Let’s walk through the horrible troubles I came across.
Safety And Security Issues & Several Bugs
Given GoHighLevel positioned itself as an all-in-one automation system, I made sure to diligently recreate every single workflow from my old Keap account.
These consisted of series for onboarding brand-new e-mail subscribers, onboarding new customers, automating follow-ups for webinar registrations, sending out occasion tips, managing subscription expiries and far more.
Whatever seemed to be operating fine … until all of a sudden it wasn’t. One morning, I awoke to discover 171 completely unimportant emails had actually been sent to customers who ought to NOT have actually obtained them. This occurred three days straight, with a various set of 160 people each day.
I desperately tried fixing and restoring the automation from scratch. However the trouble continued.
When I frantically connected to their assistance team, they slightly declared “web server problems” were to blame. Yet this explanation really did not make any kind of feeling, since the mistakes proceeded occurring each morning like clockwork unassociated to any type of downtime.
In my mind, this massive failing was completely unacceptable and simply really did not benefit my company. I have countless calls relying on my automated campaigns running efficiently.
So if GoHighLevel was mosting likely to be absolutely undependable, exactly how could I leave mission-critical workflows and sensitive client information to their technology?
The unintuitive user interface just worsened these issues …
Frustrating UX
Coming from Keap where everything was seamless and instinctive, GoHighLevel’s learning curve felt steep and difficult.
Straightforward tasks like editing and enhancing workflows involved excavating through food selection systems that were all over the place. Secret settings were unexplainably scattered in absolutely different areas. Moving between features felt disjointed or complicated.
I’ll inform you what I suggest by talking about their funnel builder as an example. There were 3 separate settings panels to take care of total, individual, and product configurations. Yet for some crazy factor, the web links to gain access to each of these core settings were spread out on opposite sides of the display. What!?
As a person that values clean, thoughtful style, this seriously frustrated me.
It reinforced that GoHighLevel still felt like a work-in-progress instead of a sleek product all set for prime-time usage. Their top priorities seemed focused on cramming in every feature under the sun, with bad use as a second thought.
And speaking of features, I soon understood the low price tag came with expensive concessions …
Deceptive Pricing GoHighLevel Training
Among GoHighLevel’s largest selling factors is the cost effective rate for access to so many features. However I quickly discovered this inexpensive base expense was deceitful.
They nickle-and-dimed users with erratic charges for core functionality. Unexpectedly my charge card statements had unclear $10 costs from GoHighLevel here and there.
As it turned out, you get charged whenever you send out an e-mail with their web servers. So for high volume individuals, this amounted to thousands of dollars in unforeseen prices.
Between these per-email fees and paying additional for deliverability add-ons like Mailgun, my “affordable” GoHighLevel membership wound up setting you back substantially greater than my Keap plan.
The reduced sticker price was alluring, however simply not sensible in practice. This bait-and-switch left a bad preference in my mouth.
Email Fees Suffered
The final dealbreaker was seeing my meticulously supported e-mail open rates plunge nearly overnight after changing to GoHighLevel.
Previously, my target market engagement consistently hit 35-40% open rates in Keap month after month. Once I migrated their records over to GoHighLevel, efficiency tanked instantly to a useless 9% open price.
No matter just how much I maximized my sending practices or attempted every repairing method, I can barely nudge open rates back into the teens– still a 50%+ decrease from my previous benchmarks GoHighLevel Training.
Let me repeat: my exact same audience and e-mails all of a sudden had terrible involvement. The only point I can believe that would be creating this was whatever was happening behind the scenes at GoHighLevel. For a firm so based on email marketing, this was a big deal.
Between the debilitating deliverability issues, concealed costs, busted features, and dreadful user interface, I had finally reached my limitation …
Why I Quit GoHighLevel after 37 Days
Just 45 days after moving my company to GoHighLevel, I knew I had made a big blunder. The cons drastically outweighed any type of advantages.
No software program is perfect, yet the large volume of troubles was beyond appropriate.
At the end of the day, software program boils down to depend on. If I can’t trust it to take care of essential functions properly or think a supplier has my benefits in mind, after that it’s time to walk away– even after spending substantial time, money, and effort migrating.
So I made the hard phone call to turn around program and return back to Keap completely just weeks after going done in on GoHighLevel. Allow’s explore what I gained from this ordeal.
Secret Takeaways: What I Learned From My GoHighLevel Error
My time with HighLevel can be summarized as an expensive accident. Yet in hindsight, it educated me a few essential lessons:
- Stay with what jobs. Do not disturb what’s working unless something is definitively better across the board. Change brings threat.
- Veterinarian asserts completely. Marketing buzz around brand-new software application frequently obscures larger underlying flaws. Deep due persistance is essential.
- Pick simpleness over features. Well-designed tools need to make your job life simpler, not much more challenging and unpleasant.
- Transparency develops trust. Nontransparent pricing, questionable reseller terms, and finger-pointing to escape issues damages trust.
- Look for objective evaluations. Satisfied support examines mean less if excessive issues suggest poor total functionality.
- Perfection is impossible. No single solution can completely meet every distinct business demand. Discover the least-bad fit.
- Evolution over revolution. Incremental enhancements usually outweigh risky wholesale reinvention of what already works penalty.
Basically, I learned to be extra hesitant of “too good to be real” marketing claims and less lured by the attraction of shiny brand-new items. The tools you use daily must gain trust fund with openness and efficiency, not slick advertising.