As an agency owner for over a years, I count on software program and automation to simplify procedures and provide outcomes. So when GoHighLevel arised on the scene couple of years back, it absolutely caught my focus Selling GoHighLevel SaaS.
The concept was enticing– an all-in-one customer administration platform with marketing, sales, and solution tools incorporated with each other. As a business owner always wanting to simplify and scale my company, it appeared like a desire come true theoretically. Who wouldn’t want a single solution that does it all?
But in this thorough GoHighLevel review, I’ll take you inside my dreadful trip of trying (and falling short) to change to this popular new software application. You’ll find out:
If you’re considering whether GoHighLevel is right for your very own business requirements, with any luck you can gain from my unpleasant blunders and inflated expectations.
Looter: I do NOT recommend GoHighLevel. If you require a CRM, begin with this listing of finest CRMs rather. I make use of Keap.
Some GoHighLevel Alternatives
If you’re looking for a sales, marketing, and project administration choice to GoHighLevel, then below are a couple of we recommend.
Backstory: Why I Thought About Switching Over from Keap
To recognize what attracted me to GoHighLevel to begin with, you require context concerning my previous configuration. For over 5 years I had actually been happily relying on Keap (previously Infusionsoft) to fulfill all my customer administration and automation requirements.
I discovered Keap intuitive to utilize and it dealt with whatever I required– CRM, e-mail marketing, sales funnels, subscription websites, and client support.
Keap’s CRM and sales and marketing automation are designed to assist small businesses keep their customers while including brand-new ones easily. Automate follow-ups with e-mails and messages, making certain leads and customers receive the right messages at the right time. Use web site and social networks types to enhance lead follow-up, and handle your development with very easy appointment scheduling and lead monitoring. Boost sales with automated pricing estimate, invoicing, and settlement processing, freeing up your time. With Keap, small businesses can save 10 hours weekly and boost revenue by 39%. Start with a 14-day free trial, no bank card needed.
Why we like Keap
Keap provides a comprehensive consumer connection monitoring (CRM) and marketing automation solution tailored for small businesses and business owners. We appreciate Keap’s concentrate on streamlining sales processes and supporting customer partnerships via powerful automation tools. The platform’s all-in-one strategy incorporates CRM, email marketing, invoicing, and task administration, making it especially attractive for organizations seeking to combine their tech pile.
Generally, it just functioned accurately with marginal difficulty or maintenance required. My open and click-through prices were wonderful (like 35% excellent). Automations ran efficiently without concerns.
So why on earth was I tempted to uproot my entire functional foundation from a system that worked to attempt something unverified and untried?
In knowledge I can admit I got seduced by the alarm call of “glossy item disorder”. You recognize the sensation: when everyone’s talking about a brand-new device that will certainly reinvent your service … The grass often looks greener on the other side, and I wondered whether GoHighLevel may minimize rubbing factors that I would certainly discovered to endure over the years with Keap.
I stood up to at first, however a few more frustrations led me to assume possibly it was time for a change.
The Investment: Migrating My Company to GoHighLevel
Earlier this year I decided to take the plunge. I enrolled in HighLevel’s Agency plan at $297/month, spending dramatically greater than the $97/month starter expense.
This had not been a decision I ignored. I knew switching systems was mosting likely to call for migrating all my Keap information and essentially restoring my entire tech infrastructure from square one using every one of the GoHighLevel integrations available.
Right here’s an introduction of simply a few of the effort required:
- Manually exporting 20,000+ email subscriber records
- Recreating dozens of automations and workflows
- Relocating customer accounts, notes, and task data to the new CRM
- Reconfiguring my Stripe payment integration
- Setting up landing pages, discounts, and sales funnels around once again
- Learning a totally foreign UX and user interface layout
Done in, I invested around 30-40 tedious hours of configuration work transitioning whatever over– and also taking care of shed productivity during the button.
However inevitably, it was a calculated financial investment I wanted to make. I figured some short-term pain would pay off with GoHighLevel supplying a far better long-term option for my business, Dripify. Oh exactly how wrong I was …
It just took me about a month of hands-on use to realize I had actually made a big error. The problems started piling up promptly, till it got to a factor I needed to reduce my losses and switch over back to Keap completely.
Allow’s go through the horrible issues I ran into.
Safety And Security Issues & Lots of Vermin
Given GoHighLevel placed itself as an all-in-one automation platform, I took care to thoroughly recreate every workflow from my old Keap account.
These consisted of series for onboarding brand-new email customers, onboarding new clients, automating follow-ups for webinar registrations, sending out occasion pointers, handling subscription expirations and a lot more.
Everything seemed to be operating penalty … up until unexpectedly it wasn’t. One morning, I awoke to locate 171 entirely pointless emails had actually been sent out to customers who need to NOT have actually received them. This happened 3 days in a row, with a different set of 160 individuals each day.
I desperately attempted fixing and restoring the automation from scratch. Yet the problem continued.
When I seriously connected to their assistance team, they vaguely asserted “server problems” were responsible. But this description didn’t make any type of feeling, because the errors continued taking place each early morning like clockwork unassociated to any type of downtime.
In my mind, this large failure was entirely undesirable and simply really did not help my company. I have countless contacts relying upon my automated campaigns running smoothly.
So if GoHighLevel was going to be completely unreliable, how could I leave mission-critical workflows and sensitive customer data to their technology?
The unintuitive user interface just worsened these concerns …
Discouraging UX
Coming from Keap where whatever was seamless and intuitive, GoHighLevel’s learning contour felt steep and difficult.
Straightforward tasks like modifying workflows involved digging with menu systems that were all over the place. Trick settings were unexplainably scattered in totally different sections. Relocating between functions really felt disjointed or complex.
I’ll tell you what I indicate by discussing their funnel builder as an instance. There were 3 separate settings panels to take care of overall, individual, and item setups. Yet for some insane reason, the links to gain access to each of these core setups were expanded on contrary sides of the display. What!?
As somebody who values clean, thoughtful style, this seriously upset me.
It enhanced that GoHighLevel still seemed like a work-in-progress instead of a polished product all set for prime-time usage. Their priorities seemed concentrated on stuffing in every feature imaginable, with bad functionality as an afterthought.
And speaking of features, I quickly realized the low price tag included costly concessions …
Deceptive Pricing Selling GoHighLevel SaaS
One of GoHighLevel’s most significant marketing points is the inexpensive price for accessibility to so many features. But I quickly discovered this inexpensive base cost was misleading.
They nickle-and-dimed customers with occasional charges for core performance. Suddenly my credit card statements had vague $10 costs from GoHighLevel occasionally.
As it ended up, you get charged every time you send out an e-mail with their servers. So for high quantity individuals, this added up to thousands of dollars in unforeseen expenses.
In between these per-email fees and paying additional for deliverability add-ons like Mailgun, my “budget friendly” GoHighLevel membership ended up costing dramatically greater than my Keap plan.
The low price tag was tempting, but simply not practical in practice. This bait-and-switch left a negative taste in my mouth.
Email Fees Suffered
The final dealbreaker was seeing my very carefully nurtured e-mail open prices drop nearly over night after switching over to GoHighLevel.
Formerly, my target market involvement consistently hit 35-40% open rates in Keap month after month. Once I migrated their records over to GoHighLevel, performance tanked instantaneously to a useless 9% open price.
Despite just how much I optimized my sending techniques or tried every repairing method, I can hardly push open prices back into the teenagers– still a 50%+ decrease from my previous benchmarks Selling GoHighLevel SaaS.
Let me repeat: my exact same target market and e-mails all of a sudden had dreadful interaction. The only point I might think that would certainly be creating this was whatever was occurring behind the scenes at GoHighLevel. For an agency so dependent on email marketing, this was a big deal.
In between the crippling deliverability concerns, concealed fees, broken features, and awful interface, I had ultimately reached my limit …
Why I Stop GoHighLevel after 37 Days
Simply 45 days after moving my firm to GoHighLevel, I understood I had made a significant blunder. The disadvantages substantially outweighed any type of advantages.
No software application is excellent, yet the sheer quantity of problems was past appropriate.
At the end of the day, software boils down to depend on. If I can’t trust it to handle critical functions competently or believe a supplier has my benefits in mind, after that it’s time to leave– also after spending substantial time, cash, and effort moving.
So I made the hard phone call to reverse course and return back to Keap totally simply weeks after going done in on GoHighLevel. Allow’s discover what I learned from this debacle.
Trick Takeaways: What I Picked up from My GoHighLevel Mistake
My time with HighLevel can be summed up as an expensive misadventure. However in hindsight, it educated me a few vital lessons:
- Stay with what jobs. Do not distress what’s functioning unless something is definitively much better across the board. Adjustment brings threat.
- Vet declares extensively. Marketing hype around new software application typically covers bigger underlying imperfections. Deep due diligence is essential.
- Select simplicity over features. Properly designed devices need to make your work life much easier, not much more complicated and messy.
- Openness constructs count on. Nontransparent pricing, dubious reseller terms, and finger-pointing to evade troubles damages trust.
- Look for honest reviews. Satisfied assistance assesses indicate less if extreme issues imply bad overall use.
- Perfection is difficult. No single option can perfectly fulfill every distinct service demand. Locate the least-bad fit.
- Evolution over change. Step-by-step enhancements usually outweigh dangerous wholesale reinvention of what already works fine.
In short, I learned to be much more cynical of “as well good to be true” marketing insurance claims and much less tempted by the appeal of glossy brand-new items. The tools you use daily must make trust with transparency and performance, not slick advertising.