Add EXTERNAL Teams user to GAL

We collaborate a lot with another company who have their own tenant. When we want to message an “external” user in Teams we have not messaged before, we must first search and type in the full email address, then select "(External)" to message them. We also have these same users as contacts in our GAL for email. The problem we have is that when you start searching for the user, the GAL contact comes up first, and users think that this is the correct Teams user account so they select this instead of typing further to bring up the real external account. If they do make it as far as to type out the full email address, then two users show up, one from the GAL and one with "(external)" in it.

This is not a great user experience. We'd like to know if there is a way in which we can import the external user to our GAL, or if we can populate the GAL contact with the Teams attributes of the external user. The end goal is to have a GAL contact which the user can click to message in Teams.

Has anyone come across this before and has a solution?