As a firm owner for over a decade, I depend on software and automation to streamline operations and deliver outcomes. So when GoHighLevel emerged on the scene few years back, it certainly captured my focus GoHighLevel Valuation.
The concept was appealing– an all-in-one client administration platform with marketing, sales, and service tools incorporated together. As an entrepreneur constantly seeking to simplify and scale my business, it seemed like a dream come to life on paper. That would not want a solitary service that does it all?
However in this extensive GoHighLevel evaluation, I’ll take you inside my disastrous trip of attempting (and falling short) to switch over to this popular brand-new software. You’ll find out:
If you’re considering whether GoHighLevel is right for your own company demands, hopefully you can learn from my uncomfortable mistakes and inflated expectations.
Looter: I do NOT suggest GoHighLevel. If you require a CRM, begin with this listing of best CRMs rather. I make use of Keap.
Some GoHighLevel Alternatives
If you’re looking for a sales, marketing, and task management option to GoHighLevel, then here are a couple of we recommend.
Backstory: Why I Considered Changing from Keap
To understand what attracted me to GoHighLevel to begin with, you need context regarding my previous setup. For over 5 years I had actually been happily depending on Keap (formerly Infusionsoft) to satisfy all my client administration and automation requirements.
I found Keap user-friendly to utilize and it dealt with every little thing I needed– CRM, e-mail marketing, sales funnels, membership sites, and client assistance.
Keap’s CRM and sales and marketing automation are created to help local business maintain their clients while including brand-new ones effortlessly. Automate follow-ups with emails and texts, ensuring leads and clients obtain the best messages at the right time. Usage website and social media types to simplify lead follow-up, and manage your growth with very easy appointment scheduling and lead tracking. Boost sales with automated pricing quote, invoicing, and settlement processing, liberating your time. With Keap, local business can conserve 10 hours per week and rise income by 39%. Start with a 14-day free trial, no charge card needed.
Why we like Keap
Keap offers a detailed consumer connection monitoring (CRM) and marketing automation service tailored for small businesses and business owners. We value Keap’s focus on improving sales procedures and supporting customer partnerships via effective automation tools. The platform’s all-in-one method combines CRM, e-mail marketing, invoicing, and job management, making it especially eye-catching for organizations aiming to consolidate their technology pile.
For the most part, it just worked accurately with marginal fuss or maintenance called for. My open and click-through prices were terrific (like 35% great). Automations ran smoothly without concerns.
So why on earth was I lured to uproot my entire functional structure from a system that worked to attempt something unproven and untested?
In knowledge I can admit I got attracted by the alarm phone call of “glossy object disorder”. You know the sensation: when everybody’s speaking about a brand-new tool that will transform your company … The grass often looks greener beyond, and I wondered whether GoHighLevel may decrease friction factors that I ‘d learned to tolerate for many years with Keap.
I stood up to at first, yet a few even more disappointments led me to believe possibly it was time for a change.
The Financial investment: Migrating My Company to GoHighLevel
Earlier this year I chose to start. I registered for HighLevel’s Agency plan at $297/month, spending considerably greater than the $97/month starter price.
This had not been a decision I ignored. I understood switching over platforms was going to call for migrating all my Keap data and basically rebuilding my entire technology infrastructure from the ground up utilizing all of the GoHighLevel integrations offered.
Below’s a review of simply some of the initiative required:
- Manually exporting 20,000+ email client documents
- Recreating dozens of automations and workflows
- Relocating customer accounts, notes, and job data to the brand-new CRM
- Reconfiguring my Stripe invoicing integration
- Establishing landing pages, discounts, and sales funnels all over once again
- Learning an entirely foreign UX and user interface layout
Done in, I invested around 30-40 tiresome hours of arrangement work transitioning everything over– not to mention dealing with shed performance throughout the switch.
But ultimately, it was a calculated financial investment I was willing to make. I figured some temporary pain would settle with GoHighLevel giving a far better long-lasting service for my service, Dripify. Oh how incorrect I was …
It just took me regarding a month of hands-on use to realize I had made a huge mistake. The problems began piling up quickly, until it reached a factor I needed to cut my losses and switch over back to Keap totally.
Let’s go through the nightmarish issues I ran into.
Safety Issues & Numerous Vermin
Offered GoHighLevel positioned itself as an all-in-one automation system, I made sure to carefully recreate every single workflow from my old Keap account.
These consisted of sequences for onboarding new email clients, onboarding new clients, automating follow-ups for webinar enrollments, sending out occasion suggestions, handling membership expiries and a lot more.
Whatever seemed to be working fine … up until all of a sudden it wasn’t. One early morning, I awoke to locate 171 completely pointless e-mails had been sent to customers that need to NOT have received them. This occurred 3 days in a row, with a different set of 160 people daily.
I anxiously tried repairing and rebuilding the automation from scratch. However the issue lingered.
When I seriously connected to their support team, they slightly claimed “server problems” were at fault. Yet this description didn’t make any feeling, considering that the errors proceeded happening each early morning like clockwork unconnected to any downtime.
In my mind, this large failure was completely inappropriate and simply didn’t help my service. I have thousands of calls relying upon my automated campaigns running smoothly.
So if GoHighLevel was going to be entirely unstable, exactly how could I hand over mission-critical workflows and delicate customer data to their innovation?
The unintuitive interface just compounded these problems …
Discouraging UX
Coming from Keap where everything was smooth and intuitive, GoHighLevel’s learning curve felt high and challenging.
Basic jobs like editing workflows included excavating with menu systems that were all over the place. Key settings were unexplainably spread in entirely different sections. Moving in between functions felt disjointed or complicated.
I’ll tell you what I mean by discussing their funnel builder as an instance. There were 3 different setups panels to handle total, specific, and item arrangements. Yet for some crazy reason, the links to accessibility each of these core settings were expanded on contrary sides of the display. What!?
As someone that values tidy, thoughtful design, this seriously upset me.
It reinforced that GoHighLevel still seemed like a work-in-progress as opposed to a polished product ready for prime-time usage. Their priorities appeared concentrated on stuffing in every feature under the sun, with poor functionality as a second thought.
And talking features, I soon realized the low cost tag included expensive compromises …
Deceptive Pricing GoHighLevel Valuation
One of GoHighLevel’s greatest marketing points is the inexpensive rate for access to many features. But I rapidly discovered this affordable base cost was deceitful.
They nickle-and-dimed users with sporadic charges for core capability. All of a sudden my charge card statements had vague $10 fees from GoHighLevel here and there.
As it turned out, you get billed every single time you send out an email through their web servers. So for high volume users, this amounted to thousands of bucks in unanticipated costs.
In between these per-email costs and paying extra for deliverability attachments like Mailgun, my “budget-friendly” GoHighLevel subscription ended up setting you back considerably greater than my Keap plan.
The reduced sticker price was alluring, yet simply not practical in practice. This bait-and-switch left a poor preference in my mouth.
Email Fees Suffered
The final dealbreaker was seeing my thoroughly nurtured e-mail open rates drop almost over night after switching over to GoHighLevel.
Formerly, my audience engagement continually struck 35-40% open rates in Keap month after month. But once I migrated their documents over to GoHighLevel, efficiency tanked quickly to a useless 9% open price.
Despite just how much I enhanced my sending practices or tried every fixing technique, I might hardly nudge open rates back right into the teens– still a 50%+ decrease from my previous criteria GoHighLevel Valuation.
Let me repeat: my exact same audience and emails instantly had awful involvement. The only point I can believe that would certainly be creating this was whatever was taking place behind the scenes at GoHighLevel. For an agency so based on e-mail marketing, this was a big deal.
Between the crippling deliverability issues, hidden costs, damaged features, and dreadful interface, I had actually ultimately reached my limit …
Why I Give up GoHighLevel after 37 Days
Simply 45 days after migrating my company to GoHighLevel, I recognized I had actually made a substantial blunder. The disadvantages substantially outweighed any type of advantages.
No software is ideal, however the large quantity of troubles was past acceptable.
At the end of the day, software program boils down to count on. If I can’t trust it to deal with vital functions properly or believe a vendor has my best interests in mind, then it’s time to walk away– also after spending substantial time, money, and initiative moving.
So I made the difficult phone call to turn around training course and return back to Keap totally just weeks after going all in on GoHighLevel. Allow’s discover what I gained from this ordeal.
Secret Takeaways: What I Picked up from My GoHighLevel Blunder
My time with HighLevel can be summarized as an expensive ill fortune. Yet in hindsight, it showed me a couple of essential lessons:
- Adhere to what works. Do not upset what’s working unless something is definitively better across the board. Adjustment brings danger.
- Vet claims extensively. Marketing buzz around brand-new software program typically covers bigger underlying defects. Deep due persistance is vital.
- Pick simpleness over features. Well-designed tools need to make your work life easier, not more challenging and messy.
- Transparency develops depend on. Opaque pricing, unethical reseller terms, and finger-pointing to avert problems destroys depend on.
- Look for impartial testimonials. Pleased support evaluates imply less if excessive concerns indicate inadequate total usability.
- Excellence is difficult. No solitary option can completely satisfy every one-of-a-kind service demand. Locate the least-bad fit.
- Advancement over transformation. Step-by-step renovations typically outweigh high-risk wholesale reinvention of what currently functions penalty.
Simply put, I found out to be extra doubtful of “also great to be real” marketing insurance claims and less attracted by the attraction of glossy brand-new things. The tools you make use of daily should make count on through openness and efficiency, not glossy advertising.