As a company proprietor for over a decade, I rely upon software program and automation to streamline procedures and provide outcomes. So when GoHighLevel emerged on the scene couple of years back, it absolutely caught my focus How Many Employees Does GoHighLevel Have.
The concept was attractive– an all-in-one client administration platform with marketing, sales, and service tools incorporated together. As a business owner constantly looking to streamline and scale my organization, it appeared like a desire become a reality theoretically. Who would not want a single remedy that does it all?
But in this extensive GoHighLevel review, I’ll take you inside my disastrous trip of attempting (and failing) to switch over to this prominent brand-new software program. You’ll discover:
If you’re taking into consideration whether GoHighLevel is right for your own service demands, with any luck you can pick up from my agonizing errors and blew up expectations.
Looter: I do NOT suggest GoHighLevel. If you require a CRM, start with this listing of ideal CRMs instead. I use Keap.
Some GoHighLevel Alternatives
If you’re seeking a sales, marketing, and project monitoring choice to GoHighLevel, then right here are a couple of we recommend.
Backstory: Why I Took Into Consideration Changing from Keap
To comprehend what attracted me to GoHighLevel in the first place, you require context concerning my previous setup. For over 5 years I had been gladly relying upon Keap (previously Infusionsoft) to meet all my customer management and automation demands.
I located Keap intuitive to use and it managed whatever I required– CRM, e-mail marketing, sales funnels, membership sites, and customer support.
Keap’s CRM and sales and marketing automation are created to aid small businesses keep their customers while including new ones easily. Automate follow-ups with e-mails and texts, making certain leads and customers get the ideal messages at the right time. Usage web site and social media kinds to enhance lead follow-up, and handle your development with simple appointment scheduling and lead tracking. Boost sales with automated pricing estimate, invoicing, and payment handling, freeing up your time. With Keap, small businesses can save 10 hours weekly and boost earnings by 39%. Begin with a 14-day free trial, no credit card called for.
Why we like Keap
Keap offers a detailed consumer relationship monitoring (CRM) and marketing automation option customized for small businesses and business owners. We appreciate Keap’s focus on streamlining sales processes and nurturing customer partnerships through powerful automation devices. The system’s all-in-one technique integrates CRM, email marketing, invoicing, and job administration, making it especially appealing for companies seeking to settle their technology pile.
For the most part, it just functioned accurately with marginal hassle or upkeep required. My open and click-through rates were terrific (like 35% excellent). Automations ran efficiently without issues.
So why on earth was I tempted to uproot my entire operational structure from a system that functioned to attempt something unverified and untested?
In knowledge I can confess I got seduced by the alarm phone call of “glossy item syndrome”. You know the feeling: when every person’s speaking about a brand-new device that will certainly reinvent your company … The grass usually looks greener on the other side, and I asked yourself whether GoHighLevel may lower rubbing factors that I would certainly discovered to tolerate over the years with Keap.
I resisted at first, yet a few more stress led me to assume perhaps it was time for a change.
The Financial investment: Moving My Agency to GoHighLevel
Previously this year I decided to take the plunge. I registered for HighLevel’s Company plan at $297/month, investing dramatically greater than the $97/month starter cost.
This wasn’t a decision I took lightly. I recognized switching over systems was mosting likely to need moving all my Keap data and basically restoring my entire tech framework from the ground up using all of the GoHighLevel integrations available.
Here’s an introduction of simply some of the effort called for:
- Manually exporting 20,000+ email client records
- Recreating lots of automations and workflows
- Moving client accounts, notes, and task data to the new CRM
- Reconfiguring my Stripe payment integration
- Establishing landing pages, discounts, and sales funnels throughout once more
- Learning a completely foreign UX and user interface layout
Done in, I spent around 30-40 tedious hours of setup work transitioning whatever over– as well as dealing with lost productivity throughout the button.
However eventually, it was a computed financial investment I wanted to make. I figured some short-term pain would pay off with GoHighLevel providing a better long-term solution for my organization, Dripify. Oh how wrong I was …
It only took me concerning a month of hands-on usage to recognize I had made a large mistake. The issues began accumulating quickly, until it reached a point I needed to reduce my losses and switch over back to Keap entirely.
Allow’s walk through the horrible troubles I came across.
Security Issues & Lots of Vermin
Provided GoHighLevel positioned itself as an all-in-one automation system, I made sure to thoroughly recreate every workflow from my old Keap account.
These consisted of series for onboarding brand-new e-mail customers, onboarding new clients, automating follow-ups for webinar registrations, sending out event tips, handling membership expirations and far more.
Everything seemed to be working fine … until all of a sudden it had not been. One early morning, I woke up to find 171 totally irrelevant emails had actually been sent to users that ought to NOT have actually gotten them. This happened 3 days in a row, with a various batch of 160 individuals each day.
I hysterically tried troubleshooting and rebuilding the automation from scratch. But the problem continued.
When I desperately reached out to their support group, they vaguely claimed “server issues” were to blame. But this explanation really did not make any type of sense, given that the mistakes continued happening each morning like clockwork unconnected to any kind of downtime.
In my mind, this huge failing was completely unacceptable and simply really did not work for my organization. I have thousands of contacts relying upon my automated campaigns running smoothly.
So if GoHighLevel was going to be completely unstable, exactly how could I turn over mission-critical workflows and sensitive client data to their innovation?
The unintuitive user interface only compounded these problems …
Frustrating UX
Originating from Keap where everything was seamless and intuitive, GoHighLevel’s learning contour really felt steep and complex.
Easy tasks like editing and enhancing workflows involved excavating through food selection systems that were all over the place. Key settings were unexplainably spread in absolutely different areas. Relocating between features felt disjointed or complicated.
I’ll tell you what I indicate by talking about their funnel builder as an instance. There were 3 different setups panels to take care of general, private, and item arrangements. Yet for some insane reason, the links to gain access to each of these core setups were expanded on opposite sides of the screen. What!?
As a person who values tidy, thoughtful layout, this seriously annoyed me.
It enhanced that GoHighLevel still seemed like a work-in-progress as opposed to a polished product prepared for prime-time usage. Their concerns seemed concentrated on stuffing in every feature imaginable, with bad usability as a second thought.
And talking features, I quickly recognized the low cost tag featured pricey compromises …
Deceptive Pricing How Many Employees Does GoHighLevel Have
Among GoHighLevel’s greatest marketing factors is the budget friendly price for access to a lot of features. However I promptly learned this inexpensive base price was deceptive.
They nickle-and-dimed individuals with sporadic fees for core performance. All of a sudden my charge card statements had obscure $10 costs from GoHighLevel here and there.
As it ended up, you obtain billed whenever you send an email via their servers. So for high volume individuals, this amounted to thousands of dollars in unexpected prices.
Between these per-email fees and paying extra for deliverability add-ons like Mailgun, my “inexpensive” GoHighLevel membership ended up setting you back substantially greater than my Keap plan.
The reduced sticker price was alluring, but just not reasonable in practice. This bait-and-switch left a negative preference in my mouth.
Email Fees Suffered
The final dealbreaker was seeing my very carefully nurtured e-mail open prices plummet virtually over night after switching over to GoHighLevel.
Previously, my target market involvement regularly hit 35-40% open rates in Keap month after month. But once I migrated their documents over to GoHighLevel, efficiency tanked promptly to a pitiful 9% open price.
Despite just how much I enhanced my sending out methods or tried every repairing technique, I might hardly nudge open rates back into the teenagers– still a 50%+ decrease from my previous benchmarks How Many Employees Does GoHighLevel Have.
Let me repeat: my exact same audience and e-mails instantly had terrible involvement. The only thing I can believe that would certainly be triggering this was whatever was happening behind the scenes at GoHighLevel. For an agency so based on email marketing, this was a big deal.
Between the crippling deliverability concerns, hidden costs, broken features, and awful interface, I had actually lastly reached my restriction …
Why I Give up GoHighLevel after 37 Days
Simply 45 days after moving my agency to GoHighLevel, I recognized I had actually made a significant mistake. The cons substantially exceeded any benefits.
No software application is perfect, but the large volume of issues was past acceptable.
At the end of the day, software comes down to trust fund. If I can’t trust it to deal with critical features capably or think a supplier has my benefits in mind, after that it’s time to leave– also after spending significant time, cash, and effort migrating.
So I made the tough phone call to turn around course and return back to Keap completely just weeks after going done in on GoHighLevel. Let’s explore what I picked up from this ordeal.
Secret Takeaways: What I Gained from My GoHighLevel Mistake
My time with HighLevel can be summarized as a pricey misadventure. But in hindsight, it showed me a couple of crucial lessons:
- Adhere to what jobs. Don’t disturb what’s working unless something is definitively better across the board. Modification brings threat.
- Veterinarian asserts thoroughly. Marketing hype around brand-new software application frequently covers larger underlying defects. Deep due diligence is necessary.
- Pick simpleness over features. Properly designed tools must make your job life easier, not more challenging and messy.
- Transparency develops trust fund. Opaque pricing, questionable reseller terms, and finger-pointing to evade problems ruins depend on.
- Seek unbiased reviews. Happy assistance reviews mean less if excessive issues indicate bad overall usability.
- Excellence is difficult. No single option can flawlessly fulfill every distinct company requirement. Locate the least-bad fit.
- Development over change. Incremental renovations generally outweigh high-risk wholesale reinvention of what already functions penalty.
Basically, I found out to be a lot more hesitant of “also good to be true” marketing cases and much less lured by the attraction of glossy new things. The tools you use daily must earn depend on with transparency and efficiency, not glossy advertising.