While working in any organization, one of the most significant aspects of productivity is knowledge sharing. A lot of knowledge that we work with today is built around the contacts we do business with. In other words, business is about people and contacts are the main ingredient of the knowledge we share at work.
Thanks to aggregating information, your team can achieve better results. By getting access to more information, your employees can boost their performance. To fully benefit from knowledge sharing, you need to provide tools that enable sharing data and help to automate this process.
At first glance, it might sound easy to do contact sharing. You know, just message your colleague the contact details and that’s it. Sure that’s simple if it’s about one or two contacts but how do you share several contacts and how can you share the wealth of knowledge about these contacts that you collected over the years?
This is where applications come into play that help your organization to work more efficiently. Shared Contacts for Gmail is just one of the examples – it makes it easier to share contacts by creating a common contact repository among your colleagues and basically enabling your organization to share contacts in the same way as you share Google Docs, or spreadsheets (for the spreadsheet fans among you).
In this blog post, we’ll take a closer look at why your employees should have an easy way to share contacts with each other – and why it is so important to deliver the tools that facilitate contact sharing, efficiently across teams and across your organization.
Save Time for Your Team Members
Do you know anyone who likes wasting time? Neither do we. Being productive at work is one of the keys to success.
You may not think about it, but sharing contacts in any organization can cost a lot of time and cause friction among your employees who need to continuously share contacts and keep them updated all the time.
Saving time is one of the most crucial aspects of contact sharing – and the reason for most tools we use at work. Especially when it comes to contacts, we are losing precious minutes or even hours by manually creating and sharing contact records. However, using dedicated plugins can make this process more efficient and help save time.
Once you share contacts with your employees, you can also save some time for your customers and business partners, as the communication will be much faster and more adjusted to customers’ needs. Instead of spending time on tedious tasks, your customer service team or sales reps will have more time to focus on what is essential in your business.
Example: Sales team productivity through contact sharing
You are in charge of organizing an event. There are four people on your sales team. Your main goal is to sell some booths.
Each salesperson has their own address book. Some of them even have the same contact in their address book (as we know, sales reps usually have the contact details of the most critical decision-makers saved in their notebook or phone). Still, they need to update it individually if any new info pops out. It is tiring, time-consuming, and, put, annoying.
Why is that? Gmail does not allow users to do contact sharing. As ridiculous as it sounds, it is accurate and can make work a nightmare.
Sales reps would like to work on the same, regularly updated in the real-time, address book, to save time and effort. With Shared Contacts for Gmail, you can share contacts with your coworkers and, therefore, seal your deals quickly.
As a salesperson, you can share your address book with the users and groups of your choice. You choose who can edit it or delete it, as well as some sync options. Even though you shared it with others, you still have some control over it.
When you share the contact manually, you may lose sight of it. The address book you’ve created is now available for everyone you granted access to. Contacts are synchronized, the sales department is happy, customer data is also automatically updated in the shared group, and booths are selling fast.
Example: Working in the education field
Imagine a school where 100 teachers give lessons to ten classes, but there is only one leading teacher in each class who has contact with all the parents of the students.
Then, imagine that one teacher would like to contact a couple of parents regarding a school trip. Another teacher would love to get in touch with the parents of a particular student who is highly talented and wants to discuss sending the child to a competition.
The struggle is real. Whoever worked at school knows that it is one hell of a ride, and asking colleagues for a single contact may take ages.
This is where Shared Contacts for Gmail come in handy, helping big and well-structured organizations share contacts within teams. Hassle-free. And in seconds.
Enable Smooth Communication
How often does one client require contact from several teams? The answer is simple: very often.
Sometimes clients need help from customer service, and sometimes your sales team needs to email them for another reason. Within one organization, one can simplify every procedure once data is shared.
Needless to say, it helps a lot if your team has quite a lot of new people joining or when team members have days off. No one would like to be disturbed during their holidays with emails asking about one single contact.
So, apart from taking care of your customer satisfaction, you want to take care of your employees’ happiness, not let them react during the holidays, and have everything sorted before their days off.
Please take a look at our customer stories to see how we are supporting different organizations to create a smoother internal communication process.
Support Sales
Tools like Shared Contacts for Gmail can be helpful for the sales team while its members approach new customers.
Your company’s sales reps need to know whether one of their colleagues has already reached out to a potential customer or not. Or maybe a new contact is interested in your offer, and someone else is taking over? It needs to be visible what the discussion has been about and which points are interesting for the prospect.
Typically sales teams are split into two groups. Typically, a Business Development Rep is looking for new prospects and tries to get them in. A Sales Rep then takes over these prospects to close the deal. Contacts and information related to contacts must be shared efficiently at this intersection between Business Development and Sales. After all, if it’s not efficient, it won’t be done by someone working in sales.
It plays an even more important role if your company does not have a CRM and is not planning to get one. Not all companies need a CRM. A well-customized Google Workspace, along with Shared Contacts for Gmail, can successfully replace CRM and skyrocket your sales process.
Read more: Common Problems with Sales and Solutions
Sustain the Communication
Life is unpredictable, and you don’t know when your employees might be sick, for example.
To avoid the situation when an unplanned absence of a team member influences your relationship with a client, you need to make sure that employees share essential data, including contacts.
The sooner you act, the sooner you can be sure that the data about clients and contacts are securely stored. Then, you won’t have to worry about such circumstances.
Secure your data
We can be sure that in almost every organization, employees will find ways to share contacts. That is why providing an app to make this process more effortless and secure is essential.
With a dedicated tool, your company’s data will be safe. While sharing contacts, pay attention to managing access. You probably do not want everyone to access an entire list of contacts.
You can share groups of contacts with the right employees and let them edit or update the list. Sharing sensitive contacts on a piece of paper or in the form of a sticky note is not safe (and not GDPR compliant either), and you need to face it.
With Shared Contacts for Gmail, you have control over who can edit, who can delete, and who can sync contacts in a shared address book. This way, you can ensure that no one unauthorized won’t access your precious list of contacts.
How to Share Google Contacts?
If your company uses Google Workspace or even individual Gmail accounts for contacting and communicating, you are a lucky one! Although Google itself does not offer any native features allowing for sharing contacts directly across different accounts, Shared Contacts for Gmail makes it possible to share contacts across organizations.
Shared Contacts for Gmail can be a game-changing feature for organizations that use the Google ecosystem for everyday work. Within the Google Workspace universe, your employees can share documents, spreadsheets, and contacts – and now they can easily and quickly share contacts.
You can use Shared Contacts for Gmail in different ways. The easiest way is to sign up for a free trial and then install our Gmail add-on. After you have added Shared Contacts for Gmail to your organizations, you will be able to do contact sharing and set permissions to ensure that there is control over who can update and edit contacts.
Mobile phones/ tablets and even Microsoft Outlook support Shared Contacts for Gmail. It automatically updates every single change on all devices so that your employees will always be able to access up-to-date information and won’t have to waste time with outdated information.
That way, your co-workers can seamlessly share their contacts with each other and benefit from each other’s connections if needed. Your customer service team, account managers, or sales reps will thank you for that. It is also safe, so you don’t need to be afraid of the leak of any sensitive data regarding contacts from your organization.
Limited API access protects the privacy of your contacts. There is an assurance that contacts are only shared within your organization and not beyond. Shared contacts are supported on your own domain, sub-domains, and external domains. You no longer need to worry if you have an email address different from @gmail.
Wrap-Up
Many companies underestimate the power of contact sharing. There are many reasons behind it – some of them think it is not safe. Others claim that they do not need it.
Some companies do not implement it on purpose. For example, their sales team does not want to share their clients’ relations and contacts. This may be due to fear of stealing contracts within an organization.
No matter your reasoning, it is high time for you to open your eyes and appreciate the smooth contact sharing. It can make work more accessible, more effective, quicker, and more satisfying.
In summary, sharing contacts in a secure way across organizations increases transparency. Moreover, it promotes internal collaboration and communication and improves business outcomes.
Start today – use Shared Contacts for Gmail and boost your team’s productivity. It is available via Google Marketplace. This app is easy, user-intuitive, and very light. So, no one will face any problems with onboarding and implementing their everyday tasks. Good luck with improving your company’s performance!
