When people hear that BrandTrellis chose GoHighLevel as a core part of our tech stack, they often assume it was primarily for the CRM.
It wasn’t.
In fact, when it comes to CRM alone, GoHighLevel isn’t the strongest player on the market. And we say that as fans of the platform. Where it really shines is as an extremely powerful, cost-effective sales and marketing automation engine that happens to have a decent CRM packaged with it.
Let’s explain.
The Two Worlds of CRM
In the experience of the BrandTrellis team, most CRMs fall into two broad categories:
Enterprise CRMs
These tools are built for account-based selling. They handle:
- Accounts (companies)
- Multiple related contacts tied to those accounts
- Complex deal structures involving multiple stakeholders
- Advanced segmentation and marketing rules at the account level
Think:
Lightweight CRMs
These tend to:
- Focus primarily on contacts and deals
- Offer a simple pipeline interface
- Have a looser concept of “account,” often with weaker enforcement and data integrity
GoHighLevel is very much in that second category. It has a concept of accounts, but that’s relatively new and still evolving. It is good enough for many businesses, but if you’re doing serious enterprise account-based selling with complex buying committees, Salesforce or HubSpot is still the better fit.
So Why Did We Choose Go High Level?
Because “adequate CRM + powerhouse automation” beats “world-class CRM + expensive add-ons” for the kinds of clients we typically serve.
For most small to mid-sized businesses:
- They are not selling into Fortune 100 enterprises with 11 decision-makers and hundreds of irrelevant employees attached to each account.
- They need reliable contact management, a pipeline and a way to track opportunities.
- They absolutely need automation: email sequences, SMS, lead nurturing, event-based follow-up and more.
GoHighLevel delivers a CRM that is familiar in layout (pipelines, deals, contacts), and a full-blown, enterprise-grade workflow engine that rivals much more expensive platforms.
The Real Star: Enterprise-Level Automation Without Enterprise Pricing
This is where Go High Level really pulled ahead for us.
Platforms like:
- HubSpot Marketing Hub
- Salesforce Marketing Cloud
- Constant Contact’s advanced automation (formerly SharpSpring)
offer sophisticated workflow capabilities, but at a price point that quickly becomes digestible only for larger enterprises.
With GoHighLevel, you get:
- Visual workflows
- Event-based triggers
- Time-based sequences
- Multi-channel outreach (email, SMS, calls)
- Conditional logic
All of these things are bundled into a flat, affordable pricing model, without paying extra for each automation tier or feature pack.
From an agency perspective, that’s huge. The monthly license our clients would pay just to access some of these automation capabilities in other platforms can often cover our services to design, run and optimize those campaigns for them.
The Hidden Advantage: Built-In Channels
The other reason Go HighLevel tipped the scales for us is that it doesn’t stop at “email automation.” Inside the same platform, we get:
- Calling, via integrated voice (e.g., Twilio)
- SMS campaigns
- Chat widgets for websites
- Social integrations, like Facebook Messenger and Google Business Messages
- AI agents – both chat and voice – capable of answering calls, capturing lead information and triggering workflows.
In many other ecosystems, each of those would be a separate tool, with separate logins and billing. And each would be another integration project to implement and maintain.
With GoHighLevel, these capabilities are native. That doesn’t mean they’re perfect or always best-in-class compared with specialist tools, but they are “good enough” for the vast majority of use cases, and the operational simplicity is tremendous.
Why ‘Adequate CRM’ Is Often Enough
When we’re working with small and mid-size businesses, the bottleneck isn’t usually “Salesforce-level account modeling.” It’s:
- Leads not being followed up on
- Prospects falling out of sequences
- No consistent outbound motion
- No tracking of which workflows actually drive revenue
If a platform:
- Lets us define and manage pipelines
- Keeps contact records reasonably clean
- Supports robust automation around those records
then we can generate a lot of value for the client without needing the heavier enterprise CRM features. That’s what GoHighLevel gives us: a CRM that does the job, plus automation horsepower that usually only comes with much more expensive systems.
The Bottom Line
We didn’t choose GoHighLevel because it’s the “best CRM” in the world. It isn’t.
We chose it because it:
- Does CRM well enough for most of our clients
- Offers an enterprise-caliber marketing automation engine at a non-enterprise price
- Bundles in calling, SMS, chat, AI agents and social messaging
- Lets us focus on designing effective campaigns rather than stitching 10 tools together.
If you’re a small or mid-sized business that doesn’t need deeply sophisticated account-based selling, that combination is hard to beat.
