Beware of Go High Level CRM

As I make a break back into the digital marketing industry; coming from an 8 year hideous after graduating from college back in 2017 with a BA in Media Communications. Not only has the industry changed but so have I. I’ve gotten older,  smarter, mastered my soft skills, obtained experience from many different roles including management and sales.

Dipping my toes back into the digital marketing industry; I came across a platform called Go High Level. It looked very interesting, and has been around since 2017 which was the year I graduated from college. I was interested in the sheer fact that I could white label it and potentially sell the sub accounts to digital marketing clients. At the time, I wasn’t ready to dive in the deep end myself. However, I wanted to keep it in the back of my mind if I happened to run across a client in need or looking for a CRM. I wanted to be one step ahead of the upsell.

One day I came across a Craigslist ad for a position to work in Go High Level for a local business working in the tax debt relief industry. I saw it as a good opportunity for me to get paid to learn and get some experience in Go High Level. This company was in the process of moving their 500k lead base from Veloficy CRM which they had been using since 2008 to Go High Level.

With my eagerness to learn and my background in Web development I was initially happy to jump on board the project.

It started off with me adding some custom fields and creating a workflow that automats stage movements in a pipeline for their sales funnel. It did not take long for me to realize that the application itself is super slow. I mean Dial Up slow. How can a modern web application be so slow these days?

The more time I spend using the application, the more I start to notice their user interface is not the most user friendly. I created a template for one of the documents that they use for their business; after I click publish you would expect the template to be published. However, you have to then click the button in the center called get links for the action to be fully completed.

A recent update to their custom field UI. A drag and drop feature to reorder custom fields turns a 30 second task into minutes after the changes revert back to where it was or doesn’t save entriely. At this point I’m not impressed. A Saas company is marketing this as a product but in fact it is operating as an Open source pet project. Just wait, it gets better.

I was then tasked with completing the A2P registration. After the first submission the Brand was approved. But the Campaign was denied. After 4 separate calls with Go High Level Support that was supposed to be A2P support; the Campaign submission was declined 4 more times. So that’s another red flag.

This business was moving from Velocify CRM which is so old school. Velocify has an old SOAP API that spits out xml data. Yuck. I wrote a Python script to make a request to Velocify API and retrieve Action Notes for thousands of leads and write it to a csv file. This csv file was then imported into GHL. The only place I could put it was in the Notes Tab of the lead. Later after the WaveDialer integration, I found out that Wave Dialer writes to that same Notes tab after every call. I know what you’re thinking, what a nightmare. Of course, it gets better.

Speaking of importing. There was another guy that was initially tasked with exporting from Velocify and importing 500k leads into Go High Level. Well we all found out that the majority of those leads were unassigned. Which is a sales office makes it nearly impossible for the agents to get any productive work done if they don’t know which leads are theirs.

I was tasked with playing clean up. I exported leads by campaign and by sales agent. I first updated and created the leads while including a tag. I came to realize that their importing was not 1000% accurate and provides no useful feedback. After each import I exported the leads with the tag to get the Lead ID from GHL. That export of leads from GHL was then used to update and create Opportunities. Similarly to Salesforce; the closers mostly work through their opportunities.

Get this, somehow a 1420 lead file turned into 142 opportunities. Huh?

Then I tried a different campaign; a 1307 file of leads turned into 141 opportunities in GHL.

Very strange that both are large files, over 1k leads and both ended with the same amount of opportunities assigned to that agent.

At this point, too many problems are stacking up and my gut is telling me something is wrong.

With a quick Google Search; I’m finding GHL complaints on the Better Business Bureau.

I’m finding a similar blog post about an agency with 20k leads that made a similar switch and ended up switching back because of some similar problems in GHL.

That’s what inspired this post. I know what it feels like to have high hopes and to then get screwed. I would hate for a good business to get hurt because of this trap.

I would also hate to see the billing from GHL. It is stated on their site that they have charges associated with failed A2P registration. I used a premium trigger for a WaveDialer workflow that ended up being used 1400 times. That will be added to the bill. Yeah, I personally haven’t seen an invoice but they will nickel and dime you for every little thing on top of their monthly fee. With all that being said.

Could GHL work for a small business on a small scale? Yes.

Is GHL an enterprise level application? Absolutely not.

Do I personally trust the platform? No.

Will I sell this to clients? Nope.

All in all, I would personally choose to stay away from GHL entirely. There are too many other platforms out there that get the job done and work as expected. Save yourself some money and the head ache.