As a firm owner for over a years, I rely on software application and automation to streamline procedures and supply outcomes. So when GoHighLevel arised on the scene couple of years back, it absolutely captured my interest Who Is The CEO or Co-Founder of GoHighLevel.
The concept was appealing– an all-in-one client management platform with marketing, sales, and solution tools incorporated with each other. As a business owner constantly seeking to streamline and scale my service, it felt like a desire happened on paper. Who would not desire a solitary service that does it all?
However in this thorough GoHighLevel review, I’ll take you inside my dreadful trip of trying (and stopping working) to switch over to this popular new software application. You’ll learn:
If you’re taking into consideration whether GoHighLevel is right for your own organization needs, ideally you can learn from my uncomfortable errors and blew up assumptions.
Looter: I do NOT advise GoHighLevel. If you require a CRM, start with this checklist of best CRMs instead. I make use of Keap.
Some GoHighLevel Alternatives
If you’re seeking a sales, marketing, and job management option to GoHighLevel, then here are a few we recommend.
Backstory: Why I Considered Switching from Keap
To comprehend what attracted me to GoHighLevel in the first place, you require context about my previous setup. For over 5 years I had been gladly counting on Keap (previously Infusionsoft) to meet all my client management and automation needs.
I found Keap user-friendly to make use of and it took care of whatever I needed– CRM, email marketing, sales funnels, subscription websites, and customer support.
Keap’s CRM and sales and marketing automation are created to help small companies keep their clients while including new ones easily. Automate follow-ups with emails and messages, ensuring leads and customers obtain the appropriate messages at the right time. Use site and social media forms to simplify lead follow-up, and handle your development with simple appointment organizing and lead tracking. Boost sales with automated quoting, invoicing, and payment processing, maximizing your time. With Keap, local business can save 10 hours per week and rise earnings by 39%. Begin with a 14-day free trial, no bank card called for.
Why we like Keap
Keap offers a thorough consumer relationship administration (CRM) and marketing automation option customized for small companies and entrepreneurs. We value Keap’s concentrate on improving sales procedures and supporting consumer partnerships via powerful automation devices. The platform’s all-in-one approach integrates CRM, email marketing, invoicing, and job monitoring, making it particularly appealing for organizations seeking to settle their technology pile.
Generally, it just functioned dependably with very little fuss or maintenance needed. My open and click-through prices were excellent (like 35% fantastic). Automations ran efficiently with no issues.
So why in the world was I lured to uproot my whole functional structure from a system that functioned to try something unverified and untried?
In hindsight I can admit I obtained attracted by the siren call of “glossy object syndrome”. You recognize the sensation: when everybody’s discussing a brand-new device that will reinvent your organization … The lawn frequently looks greener beyond, and I wondered whether GoHighLevel might minimize rubbing factors that I ‘d found out to endure throughout the years with Keap.
I resisted initially, however a few more aggravations led me to assume possibly it was time for an adjustment.
The Investment: Moving My Agency to GoHighLevel
Previously this year I chose to start. I enrolled in HighLevel’s Agency plan at $297/month, spending substantially greater than the $97/month starter price.
This wasn’t a choice I ignored. I recognized switching over platforms was going to call for moving all my Keap data and essentially restoring my entire technology infrastructure from square one utilizing all of the GoHighLevel integrations available.
Below’s an introduction of simply a few of the initiative needed:
- Manually exporting 20,000+ e-mail customer records
- Recreating dozens of automations and workflows
- Relocating client accounts, notes, and project data to the new CRM
- Reconfiguring my Stripe payment integration
- Setting up landing pages, coupons, and sales funnels throughout once more
- Learning a completely foreign UX and interface style
All in, I invested around 30-40 tiresome hours of arrangement job transitioning whatever over– as well as dealing with shed productivity throughout the button.
Yet eventually, it was a calculated financial investment I wanted to make. I figured some temporary pain would settle with GoHighLevel supplying a far better long-term service for my organization, Dripify. Oh just how incorrect I was …
It only took me regarding a month of hands-on use to recognize I had made a huge mistake. The problems started accumulating rapidly, until it got to a point I needed to reduce my losses and change back to Keap entirely.
Allow’s go through the horrible issues I experienced.
Security Issues & Several Bugs
Offered GoHighLevel placed itself as an all-in-one automation platform, I took care to diligently recreate every single workflow from my old Keap account.
These included series for onboarding brand-new email customers, onboarding new customers, automating follow-ups for webinar enrollments, sending out occasion pointers, handling subscription expirations and a lot more.
Everything appeared to be working fine … until all of a sudden it had not been. One early morning, I woke up to discover 171 completely pointless e-mails had been sent to customers that should NOT have received them. This occurred three days straight, with a different set of 160 individuals each day.
I hysterically tried fixing and restoring the automation from scratch. However the trouble lingered.
When I seriously connected to their support team, they vaguely claimed “server concerns” were at fault. But this explanation really did not make any kind of sense, because the errors continued occurring each morning like clockwork unassociated to any type of downtime.
In my mind, this substantial failure was completely unacceptable and just really did not benefit my business. I have thousands of get in touches with counting on my automated campaigns running smoothly.
So if GoHighLevel was mosting likely to be totally undependable, how could I leave mission-critical workflows and sensitive customer information to their innovation?
The unintuitive user interface only intensified these concerns …
Frustrating UX
Originating from Keap where whatever was smooth and instinctive, GoHighLevel’s learning curve really felt steep and complex.
Basic jobs like editing workflows involved excavating with food selection systems that were all over the place. Trick settings were unexplainably scattered in completely different sections. Relocating between functions really felt disjointed or complex.
I’ll tell you what I suggest by discussing their funnel builder as an example. There were 3 different setups panels to handle overall, individual, and product arrangements. Yet for some crazy factor, the web links to accessibility each of these core setups were spread out on opposite sides of the display. What!?
As someone who values tidy, thoughtful style, this seriously frustrated me.
It reinforced that GoHighLevel still seemed like a work-in-progress as opposed to a refined product ready for prime-time use. Their concerns seemed concentrated on packing in every feature under the sun, with bad functionality as an afterthought.
And speaking of features, I soon recognized the small cost tag included pricey compromises …
Misleading Pricing Who Is The CEO or Co-Founder of GoHighLevel
One of GoHighLevel’s greatest selling points is the inexpensive cost for accessibility to many features. However I rapidly learned this economical base expense was misleading.
They nickle-and-dimed users with occasional costs for core capability. Instantly my credit card statements had vague $10 charges from GoHighLevel here and there.
As it ended up, you obtain charged every time you send out an email with their servers. So for high volume customers, this added up to thousands of dollars in unexpected prices.
In between these per-email fees and paying additional for deliverability attachments like Mailgun, my “budget friendly” GoHighLevel registration ended up costing significantly MORE than my Keap plan.
The reduced price tag was appealing, yet 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 meticulously nurtured e-mail open prices plummet practically over night after changing to GoHighLevel.
Previously, my audience interaction consistently struck 35-40% open prices in Keap month after month. Once I moved their documents over to GoHighLevel, efficiency tanked instantaneously to a pathetic 9% open price.
Regardless of how much I optimized my sending out methods or tried every repairing method, I can hardly nudge open prices back into the teenagers– still a 50%+ decrease from my previous standards Who Is The CEO or Co-Founder of GoHighLevel.
Let me repeat: my exact same audience and emails suddenly had horrible interaction. The only thing I could think that would certainly be triggering this was whatever was happening behind the scenes at GoHighLevel. For a company so based on e-mail marketing, this was a big deal.
Between the debilitating deliverability problems, concealed costs, damaged features, and terrible interface, I had actually lastly reached my limit …
Why I Give up GoHighLevel after 37 Days
Just 45 days after migrating my agency to GoHighLevel, I understood I had actually made a massive mistake. The cons drastically outweighed any advantages.
No software program is best, yet the sheer quantity of troubles was beyond acceptable.
At the end of the day, software program boils down to trust fund. If I can’t trust it to handle critical features effectively or believe a supplier has my best interests in mind, after that it’s time to walk away– even after investing significant time, cash, and effort moving.
So I made the challenging contact us to reverse program and return back to Keap completely simply weeks after going all in on GoHighLevel. Allow’s discover what I learned from this ordeal.
Trick Takeaways: What I Picked up from My GoHighLevel Blunder
My time with HighLevel can be summed up as a costly accident. Yet in hindsight, it educated me a few crucial lessons:
- Stay with what works. Don’t upset what’s functioning unless something is definitively better across the board. Change brings danger.
- Vet declares thoroughly. Marketing buzz around brand-new software program typically covers larger underlying defects. Deep due diligence is essential.
- Pick simplicity over features. Properly designed tools must make your job life much easier, not much more challenging and messy.
- Openness develops trust. Nontransparent pricing, unethical reseller terms, and finger-pointing to escape troubles damages trust fund.
- Look for impartial evaluations. Pleased support reviews suggest much less if extreme issues suggest bad total usability.
- Perfection is impossible. No single option can perfectly fulfill every unique service requirement. Find the least-bad fit.
- Development over change. Step-by-step improvements usually surpass high-risk wholesale reinvention of what currently functions fine.
In other words, I found out to be more cynical of “as well good to be true” marketing cases and much less attracted by the allure of shiny brand-new things. The tools you utilize daily need to earn trust fund via openness and performance, not slick advertising.