How to Build a CRM on Go High Level - Full Breakdown of GHL with Video

Go High Level is an all-in-one sales platform marketed towards agencies and freelancers. However, anyone who wants to learn how to build a CRM can easily use the Go High-Level interface. From campaign development to pipeline management, GHL is fully customizable for any sales team. In this comprehensive post, we break down how to build a CRM from scratch.

Go High Level’s Best Use

The Go High-Level sales platform can be used for landing page development, review management systems, and even custom form builders. While the platform is fully customizable, its best use is as a sales CRM.

Specifically, the foundation of GHL’s tech works to manage a pipeline efficiently across an entire sales team. From there, your marketing team can build out websites, review systems, and much more. However, begin with CRM development and then learn what extra features work for your business model.

Take Inventory of Your Marketing Assets

The Go High-Level framework offers a handful of marketing services that you may already be using. For example, you can build full websites, landing pages, forms, surveys, and calendar widgets.

Before you utilize GHL to its full potential, it is important to take inventory of your marketing assets. The reason being, you want to make sure you are using GHL efficiently and effectively.

Additionally, you want to ensure that your tech is compatible with the software. Once you have a good grasp of your current website, surveys, and online funnels, you can dive into GHL and build out a CRM framework that best suits your business model.

In addition to a front-end CRM, you can build comprehensive review management systems. GHL is known for its direct integration with Google My Business & Yext. These two programs are the best local SEO tools. It is vital that you check your SEO efforts before you onboard GHL. You may want to restructure your link building and outreach based on your needs.

Account Hierarchy

Before building out a CRM, you need to understand the account hierarchy within Go High Level. GHL was built for marketing agencies. Therefore, there is an agency account and client sub-accounts. The agency account is where you can configure super admin settings, CRM colors, and API integrations.

The client sub-accounts are where you will create custom CRM solutions for multiple clients at once. You can toggle back in forth from agency view to client view easily. Specifically, you can get a quick overview of all your CRM builds in the agency dashboard. From there, you can dive into a client account to make adjustments.

If you are not an agency and plan on using Go High Level for one CRM build, it is still important that you understand the agency hierarchy. While you will primarily be in the client view, the agency panel is where you will configure all of your SMS, email, and invoice settings.

Configure Agency Account Settings

Once you understand the system hierarchy, you need to set up all the CRM settings before you can build out campaigns, pipelines, or triggers. Start with the agency settings panel.

First, create a super admin. The super admin will have access to every CRM and sub-account. From there, update the agency settings. This information will include company address, business name, and custom CSS/Java. If you ever want to customize the look of your GHL build, drop in some custom code in this portion of your settings.

The last major set up in the agency settings are your account integrations. Every sub-account email and text comes for your Twilio & Mailgun key. This key lives in the agency settings. The actual setup is pretty straightforward. Retrieve the ID from your Twilio & Mailgun accounts and input them in GHL. From here, you can finish setting up at the sub-account level.

Configure Sub-Account Settings

Sub-account settings are where you will configure the details of your CRM. Specifically, you will configure the settings for your pipeline, calendars, team accounts, custom values, facebook mapping, google my business integration, and more. You may not pull every lever in the sub-account settings, but it is important to know what lives in this portion of your CRM.

The first thing to set up is your business information. This step will be repetitive if you are building the CRM for your own use. If not, set up the information of your client. From there, you can create the account logins, configure your team calendar, and set up tw0-way integrations with both Google & Facebook.

The last major step in sub-account setup is to pick a phone number. You will be sending texts and calls directly out of the GHL CRM. Therefore, it is important to pick a local phone number for sales purposes. From there, we will dive deeper into user profiles, sales cycles, and lead routing.

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Create User Profiles For CRM Build

To create account profiles, navigate to the team management section within sub-account settings. Click, ‘create an employee,’ and add a name, email address, and password associated with the account. From there, you can select the user role.

There are two user roles: Admin & User. With this said, there are almost endless possibilities of user permission. You can designate your sales reps to view calendars, dashboards, and pipelines. On the other hand, you can give your marketing assistant full access to triggers, campaigns, and landing pages.

Ultimately, user roles will depend on your employee’s day-to-day tasks. Lastly, do not give users access to portions of the CRM they will not use. This will confuse and overcomplicate the system. It is important that sales reps focus on the tasks at hand – converting leads.

Once you have created individual user accounts, you can assign users to teams. If you have a small company or branch, this may not be necessary. However, if you have various sales teams, you can easily segment them in the team management sections.

The team functionality works best when your sales groups have different leadership, lead sources, and product offerings. You can easily segment each team by a calendar, campaign, and lead source. Once user profiles for sales members are created, you can decide how to route lead flow.

Build CRM Lead Routing System

When deciding how to build your CRM in Go High Level, lead routing is a key concept. This will ensure that no lead is left behind. There are a few ways to lead route, however, the most simple is through the campaigns tab.

When you build out campaigns, you can assign users to the campaign. More specifically, if three sales reps are assigned to a new lead campaign, the leads will automatically round-robin to the sales reps. This creates an equal distribution of leads.

Additionally, utilizing the pipelines is a great solution for larger teams. Specifically, you can create a pipeline for each sales team. Therefore, the leads that enter the pipeline can only be assigned to that team. From there, the lead will round-robin to the individual sales reps that live in that sales pipeline. Sales teams can break up the pipelines by state, product category, or like-minded sales teams.

If you want to get more granular in lead routing, head over to the triggers tab. From here, you can create rules for lead routing. For example, leads with certain tags are auto-assigned to a specific sales rep. This works great when onboarding new sales members.

If you have a lead that is unresponsive for a month, auto tag them with,’ unresponsive.’ From there, assign all unresponsive leads to your newer sales members to work. This is a very effective lead routing strategy that large teams can utilize. With all this said, to truly understand the capabilities of Go High Level, we need to break down pipelines, campaigns, and triggers further.

Create Sales Pipeline For CRM

A sales pipeline is the visual depiction of where your leads are in the sales process. Often, pipelines visualize a lead going from awareness to interest, and finally to the sale.

When learning how to build a CRM on Go High Level, the pipeline is less so an idea, and actually a functional dashboard. Specifically, you will create all the pipeline designations for your business model. This can be as simple as the new lead, application submitted, and closed sale.

Each GHL user will be able to drag people from new lead to application submitted when the action has taken place. This creates an instant visualization of what is working, what is not working, and how to optimize your sales efforts. Additionally, if a lead is not interested, every pipeline has an abandoned feature. This allows you to remove uninterested leads from the direct sales pipeline. Often, sales teams will add a long-term nurture campaign for all abanded leads.

By abandoning leads, you can put them on a better sales track and allow your team to focus on the interested buyers. The pipeline is a great tool to visualize sales activity in your CRM. However, it is important to leverage campaigns with your pipeline to create an automated sales process for every lead that raises their hand.

Build Prospect Campaign Inside CRM

A major part of learning how to build a CRM in Go High Level is campaign development. A well-crafted campaign will do all the heavy lifting for your sales team. From auto-texting to voicemail drops, you can find the hand-raisers quickly without relying on physically following up with everyone in your pipeline.

The first step in campaign development is creating the goal behind the automation. A great example of this is a new lead campaign. This new lead campaign will be designed to communicate with new leads and learn their buying intent.

Once the goal is defined, you can create messaging behind the campaign. From here, the campaign will send a series of texts, emails, and auto-calls that span about a week. The first message should explain who you are and what service you offer. From there, craft texts, voicemails, and emails that keep you front of mind.

Once messaging is created, designate the chronological structure. For example, your first day should send a text, email, and call. However, they should be spaced out by a few minutes. If not, the messaging will come across as overly automated. From there, separate the automated communication by hours or even days. When the campaign is configured, you can create a few campaigns that branch off depending on your service model.

When messaging is complete, it is time to configure your campaign settings. First, create a messaging window. This will allow leads to only received automation within the timeframe you set. A common communication window is from 9 am to 5 pm on Monday through Friday.

However, set a timeframe that works for your business model. Next, assign users to the campaign that will track communication and reach out to the leads if need be.

From there, you can auto-tag leads, allow leads to be in this campaign multiple times, or enable stop-on response. There is no one way to configure your campaign settings. However, it is vital that you know the capabilities and can create a campaign that aligns with your sales goals.

The last essential aspect of campaign development is routing leads into a campaign. Whether you source leads from a 3rd party or you run Facebook Ads, it is important that you find an automated way to manage lead flow into a campaign. If leads are traveling from one campaign to the next, you can set this up in the campaign settings. However, all leads coming from outside of Go High Level will need to be configured through the Triggers section.

Build a CRM with Triggers & Automation

The Trigger section is where you can connect campaigns, pipelines, and users to a holistic sales CRM. To this point, you have crafted separate CRM functionalities in the Go High Level interface. Triggers allow you to thread the needle across the platform.

Building a trigger starts with an action that onsets the automation. Once the trigger event is set, create the action that will follow. For example, you can set a trigger to fire when someone is added to a sales pipeline. From there, the lead will automatically be added to a new lead campaign.

There are hundreds of trigger combinations that will make your life easier. In a lot of ways, if you can dream it, you can build it. Scan through your trigger option to find automation that works for you.

Connect Apps to GHL

Connecting outside apps is a huge part of any CRM. It is impossible to successfully manage a sales CRM without an integrated tech stack. Go High Level has a few direct integrations that make set up easy. First, you can integrate Facebook Lead Ads, Google My Business, Google, QuickBooks, Stripe, Twilio, and Mailgun in the sub-account settings.

However, for most sales teams, there are lead aggregators or tech partners that you want to plug into the CRM. This is where Zapier becomes an essential part of your CRM tech stack. First, navigate to your sub-account settings under the company tab. Here you will find an open API key. Copy this key and head over to Zapier. From here, Go High Level is an integrated Zapier partner so all you have to do is drop in the API key and you can integrate any apps you want.

The open API-Key & Zapier integration sets Go High Level apart from other CRM builders. Build the system that works best for your sales team and allow it to do all the work.

At the end of the day, building a CRM on Go High Level is not easy. It takes knowledge of your sales team as well as technical CRM skills. If you do not know where to start, reach out to us at MortgageColumn for some guidance.

Henry

Henry has spent the bulk of his career working for mortgage companies and marketing agencies. He uses his experience in the martech industry to guide his strategies and insights in the mortgage and real estate world. He firmly believes that marketing success in every industry boils down to a technology-centered strategy.

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