How to Integrate Google Workspace With Your CRM

Video Overview (generated by Notebook LM)

The modern tech stack tends to be sprawling and complex. But getting the most out of each software tool you use — especially the most essential — requires making sure they can work well together.

At many organizations, Google Workspace is high on the list of essential products, with your customer relationship management platform (CRM) likely ranking high as well. Workspace enables effective communication, collaboration, and digital organization internally, while the CRM helps you manage and improve your relationship with leads and customers. 

Both are essential business functions, which makes both products a top priority in many IT departments. Bringing them together to compound their value is an obvious choice.

Why CRM Integrations Matter for IT Administrators

Whatever CRM you use — whether HubSpot, Salesforce, Zoho, or another — connecting it to Workspace can simplify IT user management and reduce your workload.

How much time do you spend now handling user management? Each new employee needs to be set up on every technology platform relevant to their job. That could potentially include dozens of products — the average tech stack is in the hundreds). 

As if that wasn't enough, every time an employee moves on, they then need to be removed from all those products. And whenever an employee changes roles in the organization, you may need to change out which products they have access to, as well as the level and type of access they have to each. 

That's before you even consider the third parties that may need access to your products — freelancers your company hires, external vendors you work with, outside firms that handle specific work functions for you — the list can get long. That can quickly add up to a lot of tedious, time-consuming work for IT just managing tech access.

Integrating your CRM and Workspace can open up opportunities to automate some of that work. You can set up automated workflows that ensure user updates you make in Workspace are reflected in the CRM automatically (or vice versa). And beyond reducing the time you spend on manual admin work, it can also help:

• Ensure consistent identity management: The larger an organization gets, the more likely you are to have employees or third-party contacts with similar names. You have to be careful to avoid giving the wrong John Smith access to sensitive information meant for his similarly-named colleague.

Having the two tools already linked when you set up a new user’s profiles and access levels makes it easier to be certain you're providing the right permissions to the right person.

• Improve data security: Automating access and permission processes across the two products also reduces opportunities for mistakes. Mimecast research suggests that 95% of data breaches are caused by human error. No matter how competent your IT staff is, mistakes are an unavoidable part of human nature. 

When it comes to your company's proprietary and sensitive data, the more you can do to minimize the possibility of those errors, the better. Using tech integrations to enable automated processes can go a long way toward improving data security within your organization.

Common Challenges IT Teams Face with CRM Integrations

With any tech integration, thinking through potential issues that may arise can help you develop a stronger strategy for both completing the integration and using the products together effectively once it's done.

For IT teams, some common Workspace and CRM integration challenges to plan for include:

• Establishing access for all users that need it: Obviously, you'll need to provide access to Workspace and the CRM to your employees, but the list doesn't stop there. You also want to think about every other user who may need access, what level of access they require, and how long it should last. That likely includes external vendors, contractors you work with, and any other temporary users like temps your company hires. 

To minimize data vulnerabilities, you want to be careful not to provide external users more access than they need to perform their roles, while also making sure you're not getting in the way of their ability to handle their responsibilities. It can be a delicate balance, but by thinking through how to handle these use cases in advance and using the integration to reduce the steps involved, you can simplify some of the process.

• Extending offboarding processes beyond one product: Decommissioning accounts in a timely manner — either when someone's employment ends or a third-party contract runs its course — is crucial for maintaining data security. You don't want a disgruntled employee to have access to sensitive files they could use against you. 

By linking your main software products, you can establish an offboarding process that automatically removes access to multiple products at once. Instead of having to remember to delete accounts manually from each one, getting it done in fewer steps helps you complete offboarding sooner and more efficiently.

• Maintaining accurate tech permissions: Another key component in consistent data security is making sure all your permissions align with the role a user has in the organization. You don't want anyone — employees or external users alike — to have more access than they need. 

Your CRM and Workspace integration should make this easier on your IT team, by letting you clarify the access level in one place and know that the appropriate permissions will extend to the other.

How gPanel Supports Secure, Automated CRM Management

If integrating the two systems sounds like an arduous task, you don't have to do it the hard way. The Google Workspace management tool, gPanel, not only makes connecting Workspace and your CRM easier, but also offers features to help you make the most of that connection. With the gPanel API, you can:

• Automate user lifecycle management: Automate user provisioning across multiple tools at once, so each time you create, suspend, or remove an account in Workspace, the same action occurs in your CRM as well.
• Streamline offboarding workflows: You can also simplify offboarding procedures for employees and third parties alike, including automatically removing access to the CRM and automatically revoking OAuth permissions for the offboarded user.
• Easily manage connected apps: While OAuth connections can make it easier for employees to use third-party apps they choose, they can also introduce security vulnerabilities if not managed carefully. gPanel lets you audit and manage connected OAuth apps and the scope of their access within a centralized Workspace dashboard, helping you stay more on top of shadow IT that could otherwise pose a threat.
• Generate user reports: As an additional auditing tool, you can also use gPanel to produce reports showing who has access to your CRM, flagging inactive and unauthorized accounts that should be removed. That helps you keep a tighter lock on who's using the CRM and has access to your customer data.
  
  

Real-World Examples of CRM Automation in Action

Once you've pulled off the integration, you can start looking for use cases where automation will make your life easier. For some ideas to help you get started, here are a few examples of potential CRM automation use cases: 

• Offboarding a paid ads vendor: If you've decided it's time to move on from the company who manages your paid ads, you need a comprehensive, but efficient way to remove their account from your platforms. 

With the gPanel API, you can remove them from both Workspace and a CRM simultaneously. Suspending their account in one place automatically removes them from the other, saving you that extra step.

• Automating property management in HubSpot: A property management company that uses custom properties within HubSpot to give users labels like “Vendor, “Former Vendor, and “Employee” can simplify making updates with gPanel automations. 

Whenever you onboard or offboard someone in Workspace, you can have gPanel automatically update or remove the relevant label in your CRM as well.

• Coordinating Workspace and CRM permissions: Managing permissions is one of those frustrating tasks that's both tedious and important. Users with outdated or erroneous permissions create a security risk for your organization. 

With gPanel, you can ensure that when a user changes departments or roles, you only need to make updates in gPanel for their CRM access levels to update automatically as well. And if you used role-based access control within gPanel, making changes there will be fast and easy to begin with.

Best Practices for Managing CRM Integrations

Before setting up your CRM integrations for Google Workspace, you want to think through how you'll be using the two tools together. Here are a few suggestions to help you make the most out of the connection:

• Consider how to handle identity management: You want a good procedure for making sure you can clearly connect users in one tool and the other. We recommend letting Google Workspace be your single source of truth for user identity management, then setting up your CRM to automatically reflect relevant user details and permissions.
• Plan for compliance audits: Once the two products are integrated, gPanel makes it easy to keep track of how people are using them both. IT can run reports periodically to review factors like connected apps, permissions, and user activity. 

Staying on top of these details can help you identify issues early, and minimize security and compliance risks sooner rather than later.

• Take advantage of automations: The more your IT team is weighed down by repetitive work, the less time they have to give to more mission-critical tasks. And the more tedious tasks they have to handle manually, the higher the risks of user error. One of the biggest benefits of setting up CRM integrations for Google Workspace is that you can start automating a lot of the work your team probably hates doing now. 

Take every opportunity you can to set up automations that make your job easier. Beyond improving employee morale for your IT team, doing so can also reduce errors and improve security.

Making Life Easier for IT Admins

Your job is hard enough. As software sprawl continues to create more work and security threats get more complex, IT teams should use every tool available to help you do your job smarter. With the help of the gPanel API, CRM integrations can become a part of your existing Workspace governance strategy. 

Instead of treating the CRM as a separate system to be dealt with on its own, you can fold it into the processes you already use to manage Google Workspace. With minimal initial work, you can automate access control, improve data security, and initiate smoother onboarding and offboarding processes across both systems.

If you're not using gPanel yet, schedule a free demo to see the difference it can make. If you’re an existing Enterprise customer, get started using the gPanel API today. Your Client Success manager can help you through the process.