As a company proprietor for over a years, I rely on software application and automation to simplify operations and supply results. So when GoHighLevel emerged on the scene couple of years back, it most definitely captured my interest How To Upgrade To The GoHighLevel Pro Plan.
The concept was attractive– an all-in-one customer management platform with marketing, sales, and solution devices incorporated with each other. As a business owner constantly looking to simplify and scale my company, it looked like a desire happened on paper. Who would not desire a single service that does it all?
But in this extensive GoHighLevel evaluation, I’ll take you inside my devastating journey of attempting (and stopping working) to change to this popular new software. You’ll discover:
If you’re taking into consideration whether GoHighLevel is right for your very own service demands, with any luck you can pick up from my excruciating blunders and pumped up assumptions.
Looter: I do NOT recommend GoHighLevel. If you need a CRM, start with this checklist of best CRMs rather. I use Keap.
Some GoHighLevel Alternatives
If you’re searching for a sales, marketing, and job management alternative to GoHighLevel, then below are a couple of we suggest.
Backstory: Why I Thought About Switching from Keap
To understand what attracted me to GoHighLevel in the first place, you require context concerning my previous arrangement. For over 5 years I had been happily relying upon Keap (formerly Infusionsoft) to meet all my customer monitoring and automation needs.
I found Keap instinctive to use and it managed whatever I required– CRM, e-mail marketing, sales funnels, membership sites, and customer assistance.
Keap’s CRM and sales and marketing automation are made to help small companies keep their clients while adding new ones effortlessly. Automate follow-ups with emails and texts, ensuring leads and customers obtain the best messages at the right time. Use internet site and social media types to enhance lead follow-up, and manage your growth with very easy visit organizing and lead monitoring. Boost sales with automated estimating, invoicing, and settlement processing, freeing up your time. With Keap, small companies can conserve 10 hours weekly and boost profits by 39%. Begin with a 14-day free trial, no bank card required.
Why we like Keap
Keap supplies a thorough consumer partnership management (CRM) and marketing automation remedy tailored for small companies and business owners. We value Keap’s concentrate on simplifying sales procedures and nurturing consumer partnerships through effective automation tools. The platform’s all-in-one strategy integrates CRM, email marketing, invoicing, and job administration, making it particularly eye-catching for services wanting to combine their technology stack.
Essentially, it just worked reliably with minimal fuss or maintenance called for. My open and click-through rates were great (like 35% terrific). Automations ran smoothly without any problems.
So why in the world was I attracted to uproot my entire functional structure from a system that worked to try something unverified and untested?
In knowledge I can confess I obtained seduced by the alarm call of “shiny object disorder”. You recognize the sensation: when every person’s speaking about a new tool that will certainly revolutionize your business … The lawn usually looks greener beyond, and I asked yourself whether GoHighLevel could reduce friction points that I would certainly learned to tolerate for many years with Keap.
I stood up to at first, yet a couple of more aggravations led me to assume possibly it was time for a modification.
The Investment: Moving My Agency to GoHighLevel
Earlier this year I determined to start. I signed up for HighLevel’s Company plan at $297/month, spending substantially more than the $97/month starter cost.
This wasn’t a decision I took lightly. I understood changing systems was going to call for migrating all my Keap information and basically rebuilding my whole tech facilities from square one using all of the GoHighLevel integrations available.
Below’s an introduction of simply several of the initiative needed:
- Manually exporting 20,000+ email client documents
- Recreating lots of automations and workflows
- Relocating customer accounts, notes, and project information to the new CRM
- Reconfiguring my Stripe invoicing integration
- Establishing landing pages, promotions, and sales funnels all over again
- Learning a completely foreign UX and interface design
Done in, I spent around 30-40 tedious hours of arrangement work transitioning whatever over– in addition to handling shed performance throughout the switch.
However ultimately, it was a computed financial investment I was willing to make. I figured some temporary pain would certainly settle with GoHighLevel offering a better long-term service for my company, Dripify. Oh exactly how wrong I was …
It just took me concerning a month of hands-on usage to recognize I had actually made a huge mistake. The issues started accumulating quickly, until it got to a factor I had to reduce my losses and switch over back to Keap entirely.
Let’s walk through the horrible problems I encountered.
Safety And Security Issues & Numerous Vermin
Given GoHighLevel placed itself as an all-in-one automation system, I made sure to carefully recreate each and every single workflow from my old Keap account.
These included sequences for onboarding new e-mail customers, onboarding new customers, automating follow-ups for webinar enrollments, sending out occasion pointers, managing membership expirations and much more.
Everything seemed to be functioning penalty … till suddenly it wasn’t. One early morning, I woke up to discover 171 entirely unnecessary emails had been sent to customers who need to NOT have actually received them. This occurred three days in a row, with a various set of 160 people each day.
I anxiously tried troubleshooting and rebuilding the automation from square one. But the issue lingered.
When I desperately reached out to their assistance group, they slightly asserted “server problems” were responsible. However this explanation didn’t make any kind of sense, considering that the mistakes proceeded occurring each early morning like clockwork unconnected to any downtime.
In my mind, this substantial failure was completely unacceptable and simply really did not benefit my service. I have hundreds of get in touches with depending on my automated campaigns running efficiently.
So if GoHighLevel was mosting likely to be entirely unreliable, how could I entrust mission-critical workflows and sensitive client information to their innovation?
The unintuitive user interface only intensified these concerns …
Discouraging UX
Originating from Keap where everything was smooth and instinctive, GoHighLevel’s learning curve really felt steep and challenging.
Basic jobs like editing workflows involved excavating via menu systems that were all over the place. Key settings were unexplainably scattered in absolutely various areas. Relocating in between functions really felt disjointed or complicated.
I’ll tell you what I indicate by speaking about their funnel builder as an instance. There were 3 separate setups panels to manage total, specific, and product configurations. Yet for some crazy reason, the web links to access each of these core settings were expanded on contrary sides of the display. What!?
As a person that values tidy, thoughtful design, this seriously frustrated me.
It enhanced that GoHighLevel still seemed like a work-in-progress rather than a polished item ready for prime-time use. Their top priorities appeared concentrated on packing in every feature under the sun, with inadequate functionality as an afterthought.
And talking features, I soon realized the low cost tag included costly compromises …
Misleading Pricing How To Upgrade To The GoHighLevel Pro Plan
Among GoHighLevel’s largest selling factors is the budget-friendly rate for access to so many features. Yet I quickly learned this economical base cost was deceptive.
They nickle-and-dimed individuals with erratic fees for core functionality. Instantly my bank card declarations had vague $10 charges from GoHighLevel here and there.
As it ended up, you get charged each time you send an e-mail through their servers. So for high volume individuals, this amounted to thousands of bucks in unexpected prices.
In between these per-email fees and paying extra for deliverability add-ons like Mailgun, my “budget-friendly” GoHighLevel subscription wound up setting you back significantly MORE than my Keap plan.
The low sticker price was tempting, but simply not realistic in practice. This bait-and-switch left a bad taste in my mouth.
Email Fees Suffered
The final dealbreaker was seeing my carefully supported e-mail open prices drop virtually overnight after switching over to GoHighLevel.
Previously, my target market involvement constantly struck 35-40% open rates in Keap month after month. Once I migrated their records over to GoHighLevel, performance tanked quickly to a useless 9% open rate.
Regardless of just how much I maximized my sending techniques or attempted every troubleshooting trick, I might barely push open prices back right into the teens– still a 50%+ decrease from my previous standards How To Upgrade To The GoHighLevel Pro Plan.
Let me repeat: my exact same audience and e-mails suddenly had awful interaction. The only point I could assume that would be creating this was whatever was taking place behind the scenes at GoHighLevel. For a company so based on email marketing, this was a big deal.
Between the crippling deliverability issues, hidden costs, busted features, and dreadful user interface, I had actually finally reached my limitation …
Why I Stop GoHighLevel after 37 Days
Simply 45 days after moving my agency to GoHighLevel, I knew I had made a significant blunder. The disadvantages considerably surpassed any kind of benefits.
No software is excellent, yet the sheer volume of issues was past appropriate.
At the end of the day, software program comes down to count on. If I can’t trust it to handle critical features competently or think a supplier has my best interests in mind, after that it’s time to walk away– also after investing significant time, cash, and initiative migrating.
So I made the difficult phone call to reverse program and return back to Keap totally simply weeks after going done in on GoHighLevel. Allow’s explore what I learned from this ordeal.
Secret Takeaways: What I Learned From My GoHighLevel Mistake
My time with HighLevel can be summed up as a pricey misadventure. However in hindsight, it educated me a few key lessons:
- Stay with what works. Don’t upset what’s functioning unless something is definitively much better across the board. Change brings danger.
- Vet claims extensively. Marketing buzz around new software application commonly covers bigger underlying problems. Deep due diligence is crucial.
- Pick simplicity over features. Well-designed devices should make your work life easier, not a lot more complex and unpleasant.
- Transparency develops count on. Opaque pricing, shady reseller terms, and finger-pointing to escape issues ruins count on.
- Seek objective evaluations. Pleased assistance assesses mean less if extreme issues suggest poor overall usability.
- Perfection is difficult. No single solution can flawlessly satisfy every one-of-a-kind organization demand. Find the least-bad fit.
- Development over change. Incremental enhancements normally surpass risky wholesale reinvention of what already works fine.
In other words, I learned to be a lot more cynical of “as well great to be true” marketing cases and much less attracted by the attraction of glossy brand-new items. The tools you utilize daily ought to earn depend on via openness and efficiency, not slick advertising.