As an agency proprietor for over a years, I rely on software program and automation to improve operations and provide outcomes. So when GoHighLevel arised on the scene couple of years back, it most definitely captured my interest GoHighLevel University.
The concept was enticing– an all-in-one customer administration platform with marketing, sales, and service devices integrated with each other. As a business owner always wanting to streamline and scale my organization, it felt like a dream come true on paper. Who wouldn’t desire a single service that does it all?
But in this in-depth GoHighLevel testimonial, I’ll take you inside my devastating trip of trying (and stopping working) to switch over to this popular new software. You’ll learn:
If you’re thinking about whether GoHighLevel is right for your very own business needs, ideally you can gain from my agonizing errors and inflated assumptions.
Spoiler: I do NOT suggest GoHighLevel. If you need a CRM, start with this checklist of ideal CRMs rather. I make use of Keap.
Some GoHighLevel Alternatives
If you’re trying to find a sales, marketing, and project management option to GoHighLevel, after that here are a few we suggest.
Backstory: Why I Thought About Switching Over from Keap
To comprehend what attracted me to GoHighLevel to begin with, you require context about my previous arrangement. For over 5 years I had been gladly depending on Keap (formerly Infusionsoft) to meet all my customer management and automation needs.
I discovered Keap instinctive to make use of and it managed everything I needed– CRM, email marketing, sales funnels, membership sites, and customer support.
Keap’s CRM and sales and marketing automation are developed to aid small companies maintain their customers while adding brand-new ones effortlessly. Automate follow-ups with emails and texts, guaranteeing leads and clients receive the right messages at the right time. Use website and social networks types to simplify lead follow-up, and handle your growth with very easy visit scheduling and lead tracking. Boost sales with automated pricing estimate, invoicing, and settlement handling, liberating your time. With Keap, small companies can conserve 10 hours each week and boost profits by 39%. Begin with a 14-day free trial, no credit card required.
Why we like Keap
Keap provides a comprehensive customer connection administration (CRM) and marketing automation remedy tailored for small companies and business owners. We value Keap’s concentrate on simplifying sales procedures and nurturing customer partnerships with effective automation devices. The platform’s all-in-one method integrates CRM, email marketing, invoicing, and job monitoring, making it especially appealing for services seeking to combine their tech stack.
For the most part, it just worked reliably with very little fuss or maintenance needed. My open and click-through prices were fantastic (like 35% wonderful). Automations ran smoothly without problems.
So why in the world was I attracted to uproot my entire operational structure from a system that worked to attempt something unverified and untried?
In knowledge I can confess I got seduced by the siren call of “glossy item disorder”. You recognize the sensation: when everybody’s talking about a brand-new device that will reinvent your organization … The grass usually looks greener on the other side, and I asked yourself whether GoHighLevel could lower friction points that I would certainly learned to endure for many years with Keap.
I withstood in the beginning, however a few even more aggravations led me to assume perhaps it was time for an adjustment.
The Financial investment: Migrating My Company to GoHighLevel
Previously this year I chose to take the plunge. I signed up for HighLevel’s Firm plan at $297/month, spending significantly more than the $97/month starter cost.
This had not been a decision I took lightly. I understood switching systems was mosting likely to call for moving all my Keap information and basically reconstructing my entire tech infrastructure from scratch using every one of the GoHighLevel integrations offered.
Below’s a summary of simply several of the initiative called for:
- By hand exporting 20,000+ e-mail subscriber documents
- Recreating loads of automations and workflows
- Relocating client profiles, notes, and job data to the new CRM
- Reconfiguring my Stripe invoicing integration
- Establishing landing pages, promotions, and sales funnels throughout again
- Learning an entirely foreign UX and user interface design
Done in, I spent around 30-40 laborious hours of arrangement job transitioning every little thing over– not to mention managing shed performance during the button.
Yet ultimately, it was a calculated investment I was willing to make. I figured some short-term discomfort would certainly settle with GoHighLevel giving a much better long-term service for my service, Dripify. Oh just how wrong I was …
It only took me about a month of hands-on usage to realize I had made a huge mistake. The concerns began accumulating swiftly, up until it got to a point I had to cut my losses and switch back to Keap totally.
Allow’s go through the horrible troubles I ran into.
Safety Issues & Many Bugs
Provided GoHighLevel placed itself as an all-in-one automation platform, I took care to carefully recreate every single workflow from my old Keap account.
These consisted of series for onboarding brand-new e-mail clients, onboarding brand-new clients, automating follow-ups for webinar enrollments, sending out occasion tips, taking care of membership expirations and much more.
Whatever appeared to be operating penalty … until instantly it wasn’t. One early morning, I woke up to discover 171 totally irrelevant e-mails had been sent to customers that should NOT have obtained them. This happened 3 days straight, with a different batch of 160 people every day.
I hysterically attempted troubleshooting and restoring the automation from the ground up. Yet the problem continued.
When I frantically reached out to their assistance team, they slightly declared “web server issues” were to blame. But this explanation really did not make any type of feeling, given that the mistakes continued taking place each morning like clockwork unrelated to any kind of downtime.
In my mind, this huge failing was totally inappropriate and just didn’t work for my business. I have thousands of get in touches with depending 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 information to their technology?
The unintuitive interface just compounded these concerns …
Frustrating UX
Coming from Keap where every little thing was seamless and user-friendly, GoHighLevel’s learning curve really felt steep and difficult.
Straightforward jobs like editing workflows involved excavating with food selection systems that were all over the place. Key setups were unexplainably scattered in absolutely different areas. Moving in between features really felt disjointed or complex.
I’ll inform you what I mean by speaking about their funnel builder as an example. There were 3 different settings panels to manage total, private, and product configurations. Yet for some insane factor, the web links to gain access to each of these core settings were expanded on opposite sides of the display. What!?
As somebody that values clean, thoughtful layout, this seriously frustrated me.
It reinforced that GoHighLevel still seemed like a work-in-progress rather than a sleek product all set for prime-time usage. Their concerns seemed focused on cramming in every feature under the sun, with bad usability as a second thought.
And speaking of features, I quickly understood the small cost tag featured expensive compromises …
Misleading Pricing GoHighLevel University
One of GoHighLevel’s greatest marketing points is the budget friendly rate for accessibility to numerous features. However I swiftly learned this low-cost base expense was misleading.
They nickle-and-dimed users with occasional costs for core capability. Instantly my credit card statements had obscure $10 charges from GoHighLevel here and there.
As it turned out, you obtain charged whenever you send out an e-mail through their web servers. So for high volume users, this added up to numerous dollars in unanticipated costs.
Between these per-email charges and paying added for deliverability add-ons like Mailgun, my “economical” GoHighLevel registration wound up setting you back substantially greater than my Keap plan.
The reduced sticker price was tempting, yet simply not sensible in practice. This bait-and-switch left a negative taste in my mouth.
Email Fees Suffered
The last dealbreaker was seeing my carefully nurtured email open rates plummet practically overnight after changing to GoHighLevel.
Formerly, my audience involvement continually struck 35-40% open rates in Keap month after month. But once I migrated their documents over to GoHighLevel, efficiency tanked instantly to a pitiful 9% open rate.
Despite just how much I enhanced my sending techniques or attempted every fixing trick, I could barely nudge open prices back into the teens– still a 50%+ decline from my previous benchmarks GoHighLevel University.
Let me repeat: my exact same target market and emails unexpectedly had dreadful engagement. The only thing I could think that would certainly be causing this was whatever was happening behind the scenes at GoHighLevel. For a firm so based on email marketing, this was a big deal.
In between the debilitating deliverability issues, hidden fees, broken features, and awful interface, I had ultimately reached my limitation …
Why I Stop GoHighLevel after 37 Days
Simply 45 days after migrating my firm to GoHighLevel, I recognized I had actually made a big mistake. The cons substantially outweighed any benefits.
No software is ideal, however the sheer volume of issues was beyond appropriate.
At the end of the day, software comes down to count on. If I can not trust it to handle crucial features competently or believe a supplier has my best interests in mind, after that it’s time to walk away– even after investing substantial time, cash, and effort migrating.
So I made the hard phone call to reverse training course and return back to Keap totally just weeks after going all in on GoHighLevel. Allow’s discover what I gained from this debacle.
Key Takeaways: What I Learned From My GoHighLevel Mistake
My time with HighLevel can be summarized as a costly accident. But in knowledge, it showed me a few essential lessons:
- Stick to what works. Do not disturb what’s working unless something is definitively far better across the board. Modification brings threat.
- Vet asserts thoroughly. Marketing hype around brand-new software often obscures larger underlying problems. Deep due persistance is vital.
- Select simplicity over features. Well-designed tools need to make your work life easier, not a lot more complex and messy.
- Openness constructs count on. Opaque pricing, questionable reseller terms, and finger-pointing to avert problems ruins trust.
- Look for honest evaluations. Delighted support evaluates imply much less if excessive problems indicate bad overall usability.
- Perfection is impossible. No solitary remedy can completely satisfy every one-of-a-kind organization demand. Find the least-bad fit.
- Advancement over transformation. Step-by-step improvements typically exceed risky wholesale reinvention of what currently functions penalty.
In other words, I discovered to be more doubtful of “as well good to be true” marketing insurance claims and much less lured by the attraction of shiny new objects. The devices you utilize daily should gain trust fund via transparency and efficiency, not slick advertising.