As an agency proprietor for over a decade, I count on software and automation to enhance procedures and deliver outcomes. So when GoHighLevel arised on the scene few years back, it absolutely caught my attention GoHighLevel Virtual Workshop.
The idea was appealing– an all-in-one customer administration system with marketing, sales, and service devices incorporated together. As an entrepreneur always wanting to simplify and scale my company, it appeared like a desire become a reality on paper. That would not desire a single solution that does it all?
But in this comprehensive GoHighLevel review, I’ll take you inside my disastrous journey of trying (and failing) to switch to this prominent brand-new software program. You’ll learn:
If you’re taking into consideration whether GoHighLevel is right for your own organization requirements, hopefully you can learn from my excruciating mistakes and pumped up assumptions.
Looter: I do NOT recommend GoHighLevel. If you need a CRM, begin with this list of best CRMs rather. I make use of Keap.
Some GoHighLevel Alternatives
If you’re looking for a sales, marketing, and job administration option to GoHighLevel, then right here are a few we recommend.
Backstory: Why I Considered Switching Over from Keap
To recognize what attracted me to GoHighLevel in the first place, you need context about my previous arrangement. For over 5 years I had actually been gladly depending on Keap (formerly Infusionsoft) to fulfill all my customer management and automation demands.
I discovered Keap intuitive to use and it took care of everything I needed– CRM, email marketing, sales funnels, membership websites, and client assistance.
Keap’s CRM and sales and marketing automation are developed to assist local business maintain their clients while including new ones effortlessly. Automate follow-ups with e-mails and texts, making certain leads and customers get the appropriate messages at the correct time. Use website and social networks kinds to enhance lead follow-up, and handle your growth with easy visit organizing and lead tracking. Boost sales with automated estimating, invoicing, and repayment processing, freeing up your time. With Keap, small companies can conserve 10 hours per week and boost profits by 39%. Start with a 14-day free trial, no charge card needed.
Why we like Keap
Keap offers a detailed client partnership monitoring (CRM) and marketing automation remedy tailored for local business and entrepreneurs. We value Keap’s concentrate on streamlining sales procedures and nurturing consumer connections with effective automation tools. The system’s all-in-one technique incorporates CRM, email marketing, invoicing, and task administration, making it especially eye-catching for companies aiming to consolidate their tech stack.
Generally, it just functioned reliably with minimal hassle or upkeep needed. My open and click-through rates were wonderful (like 35% great). Automations ran efficiently without any issues.
So why in the world was I attracted to uproot my entire operational foundation from a system that worked to attempt something unverified and untried?
In knowledge I can confess I got seduced by the siren telephone call of “glossy object disorder”. You recognize the sensation: when everybody’s speaking about a new tool that will revolutionize your company … The turf often looks greener beyond, and I wondered whether GoHighLevel could reduce rubbing points that I ‘d found out to tolerate throughout the years with Keap.
I withstood initially, but a few even more irritations led me to think maybe it was time for a change.
The Investment: Migrating My Firm to GoHighLevel
Earlier this year I made a decision to take the plunge. I signed up for HighLevel’s Agency plan at $297/month, spending considerably more than the $97/month starter expense.
This wasn’t a decision I ignored. I understood switching platforms was going to call for moving all my Keap data and basically restoring my whole tech facilities from the ground up utilizing all of the GoHighLevel integrations readily available.
Below’s a summary of just several of the initiative needed:
- By hand exporting 20,000+ e-mail subscriber documents
- Recreating lots of automations and workflows
- Moving client accounts, notes, and task data to the brand-new CRM
- Reconfiguring my Stripe payment integration
- Establishing landing pages, coupons, and sales funnels throughout again
- Learning an entirely international UX and interface layout
Done in, I spent around 30-40 tiresome hours of configuration job transitioning everything over– as well as dealing with shed efficiency throughout the button.
Yet ultimately, it was a computed investment I was willing to make. I figured some short-term pain would pay off with GoHighLevel supplying a better long-lasting remedy for my service, Dripify. Oh just how incorrect I was …
It just took me regarding a month of hands-on use to recognize I had actually made a huge error. The concerns started piling up promptly, till it got to a factor I had to reduce my losses and switch back to Keap totally.
Let’s walk through the nightmarish problems I encountered.
Safety And Security Issues & Numerous Vermin
Provided GoHighLevel placed itself as an all-in-one automation system, I made sure to meticulously recreate every workflow from my old Keap account.
These included sequences for onboarding brand-new e-mail subscribers, onboarding new clients, automating follow-ups for webinar registrations, sending event pointers, taking care of membership expiries and far more.
Everything seemed to be functioning penalty … up until suddenly it wasn’t. One morning, I awoke to locate 171 entirely unimportant e-mails had been sent out to individuals who need to NOT have actually obtained them. This happened 3 days in a row, with a different batch of 160 individuals daily.
I desperately tried fixing and restoring the automation from the ground up. Yet the problem lingered.
When I desperately reached out to their assistance group, they slightly declared “web server issues” were responsible. However this explanation didn’t make any sense, considering that the errors proceeded taking place each early morning like clockwork unassociated to any type of downtime.
In my mind, this massive failure was entirely unacceptable and just didn’t work for my company. I have countless calls relying upon my automated campaigns running efficiently.
So if GoHighLevel was mosting likely to be absolutely unstable, how could I entrust mission-critical workflows and sensitive client data to their modern technology?
The unintuitive user interface only compounded these concerns …
Discouraging UX
Originating from Keap where every little thing was seamless and intuitive, GoHighLevel’s learning curve really felt high and complex.
Simple jobs like editing and enhancing workflows included digging through menu systems that were all over the place. Trick setups were unexplainably scattered in absolutely different sections. Moving in between features felt disjointed or complex.
I’ll tell you what I suggest by discussing their funnel builder as an example. There were 3 different settings panels to take care of overall, specific, and item configurations. Yet for some insane factor, the web links to gain access to each of these core setups were expanded on contrary sides of the display. What!?
As a person that values tidy, thoughtful design, this seriously annoyed me.
It reinforced that GoHighLevel still seemed like a work-in-progress as opposed to a polished item all set for prime-time use. Their concerns seemed concentrated on stuffing in every feature under the sun, with bad functionality as an afterthought.
And speaking of features, I soon understood the small cost tag came with expensive concessions …
Misleading Pricing GoHighLevel Virtual Workshop
Among GoHighLevel’s largest marketing points is the cost effective cost for accessibility to a lot of features. However I rapidly discovered this low-cost base expense was deceptive.
They nickle-and-dimed individuals with sporadic charges for core capability. Suddenly my charge card declarations had obscure $10 fees from GoHighLevel occasionally.
As it ended up, you get billed every single time you send an email through their servers. So for high volume customers, this added up to numerous bucks in unforeseen costs.
Between these per-email costs and paying added for deliverability attachments like Mailgun, my “budget friendly” GoHighLevel registration ended up setting you back substantially greater than my Keap plan.
The low sticker price was tempting, but simply not reasonable in practice. This bait-and-switch left a negative taste in my mouth.
Email Rates Suffered
The last dealbreaker was seeing my meticulously supported email open prices plummet almost over night after switching to GoHighLevel.
Formerly, my target market interaction continually struck 35-40% open prices in Keap month after month. Once I migrated their records over to GoHighLevel, performance tanked instantaneously to a pathetic 9% open rate.
Despite just how much I maximized my sending practices or attempted every fixing trick, I can hardly push open prices back into the teenagers– still a 50%+ decline from my previous benchmarks GoHighLevel Virtual Workshop.
Let me repeat: my exact same audience and e-mails suddenly had horrible engagement. The only point I could believe that would certainly be causing this was whatever was happening behind the scenes at GoHighLevel. For a company so dependent on e-mail marketing, this was a big deal.
Between the debilitating deliverability issues, hidden charges, busted features, and terrible 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 made a significant mistake. The cons substantially outweighed any kind of benefits.
No software application is perfect, however the sheer quantity of issues was beyond acceptable.
At the end of the day, software program boils down to trust fund. If I can not trust it to manage vital functions properly or believe a supplier has my benefits in mind, then it’s time to walk away– also after investing considerable time, money, and initiative migrating.
So I made the difficult phone call to turn around course and return back to Keap totally just weeks after going all in on GoHighLevel. Allow’s discover what I picked up from this debacle.
Key Takeaways: What I Gained from My GoHighLevel Blunder
My time with HighLevel can be summarized as an expensive misadventure. However in knowledge, it taught me a few key lessons:
- Adhere to what works. Do not disturb what’s working unless something is definitively better across the board. Change brings danger.
- Veterinarian claims extensively. Marketing buzz around brand-new software program often covers bigger underlying flaws. Deep due diligence is vital.
- Select simpleness over features. Properly designed tools should make your work life less complicated, not more complex and messy.
- Openness builds count on. Nontransparent pricing, questionable reseller terms, and finger-pointing to escape issues destroys count on.
- Seek unbiased testimonials. Delighted assistance examines suggest less if too much concerns indicate poor overall functionality.
- Perfection is impossible. No solitary option can completely fulfill every one-of-a-kind service demand. Find the least-bad fit.
- Advancement over revolution. Step-by-step enhancements commonly exceed risky wholesale reinvention of what currently works penalty.
In other words, I found out to be extra skeptical of “too good to be real” marketing claims and less lured by the allure of glossy brand-new items. The tools you utilize daily must earn depend on via openness and efficiency, not slick advertising.