Tally Solutions believes in purpose-driven marketing, says CMO Jayati Singh

Tally Solutions has been a three-decade legacy, providing business software solutions to small and medium-sized businesses. Founded by Bharat Goenka and Shyam Sunder Goenka at a time when accounting was manual labour, Tally turned it into a seamless computer program with a mission to make life easier for smaller businesses.

In conversation with exchange4media, Chief Marketing Officer of Tally, Jayati Singh gives us an idea about the future of the company, its marketing strategies and how it ensures the safety of client data.

Excerpts:

Who are your top clients?

In terms of clients, Tally focuses more on micro small and medium enterprises. So, from a one-man establishment to maybe a 100-200 strong establishment you will find them using Tally. From sales point of view, we don’t do any direct selling, our sale is driven through partners. Our partners have a very good network and they have played a critical role in driving our success. In our company, we also have a separate team that works with the government as the sole focus from the government side has also been digitization.

In terms of customer acquisition, our focus is on existing customers’ retention, because that’s extremely important for us. In terms of new acquisitions, we are focused across all segments, demographics and metros. Thanks to increasing digital adoption, people are becoming more digital savvy and the adoption is much easier.

Is there an international presence?

Our licence is used in 100-plus countries and we have customers all over, however, our physical presence is in 4 countries: UAE in Dubai, Kenya in Nairobi, Bangladesh in Dhaka, and Indonesia in Jakarta. We are also doing digital selling in the US and the Canadian market.

In terms of marketing and advertising, how have things evolved from what it was before? Are there any campaigns that you are looking forward to right now?

Tally’s journey initially was focused on below-the-line marketing, as it wasn’t the age of smartphones and the internet. We used to do on-ground events and a lot of education programmes. It was only around 2017 when we did our first TV ad. From the business standpoint we always felt, experiential marketing is what will make us. In the market there are a lot of products focused on accounting or inventory management however, what differentiates Tally is really in the experience of using it, the user experience of simplicity and flow. For example: In Tally, if you want to put date you can put it in any format you want, May 3rd, 3rd May, May 3, unlike other software and it will accept it. That’s the experiential marketing bit of it. In the last few years, our focus has shifted from just supporting or doing MarComm activities to really focus on brand and thought leadership holistically. The focus on digital marketing, influencer marketing, focus on partner and customer marketing, has increased manifold. Beyond just the campaigns, we have certain business as usual activities going around the clock. So, our connects on ground with customers, via events, via exhibitions, continue 365 days. To give you an example, in 2017, 27th June was announced as the international MSME day. We took it up in a big manner. In 2019, when I joined, we did our first campaign around Champions of Growth. It wasn’t about making a film, it was about recognizing, celebrating, thanking the MSME’s. We had events where we invited businesses, partnered with some associations and hosted talks beyond just business. It was more of a purpose driven marketing focused on health and wellbeing as well. This year, we celebrated MSME Day in a much bigger way by launching the second edition of MSME Honours across 6 geographies. 97 MSMEs were recognized in India across four grand physical events for their phenomenal contribution at the hyperlocal level.

There are a lot of things we are doing online because the customers nowadays are very smart and tech savvy. The whole customer decision journey is a maze. They can come into decision making cycle at any point and you have to be present at every touch point. For preparedness we have a lot of education content on our website, so that customers can refer to a video and all the troubleshooting is taken care of. We are also trying to become a more relevant brand for the new generation entrepreneurs through various initiatives.

Your firm handles so much data. How do you ensure the security of your client’s data?

Data privacy and security is taken extremely seriously at Tally. We have this concept of Tally vault which is an enhanced security system that allows encryption of customer data. TallyVault uses a non-stored Vault password and the decrypted form of data is not stored on the system. A combination of such algorithms ensures that Tally Vault is one of the most secure means of data storage. So fortunately, or unfortunately, for a business owner, if they lose their vault password, we also can’t recover it for them, as we don’t store them. Your business data is only for your eyes. That’s why we keep telling our customers that they should keep taking data backups at regular intervals.

What are you focusing on for growth in the next few years?

In the last one year, we have seen people come back stronger (from the pandemic), taking things head on. So, the focus is really now on continuing to strengthen our own product pipeline to ensure that we keep enhancing functionalities in our product to cater to the customer requirements. And at marketing level, continuing the education, migration to the latest version of TallyPrime, and continuing to focus on working with the partners. At a brand level, keeping our connect with the customers and associations. We have good announcements in pipeline and we are anticipating one towards the end of this year. This is going to be TallyPrime release 3.

We recently did a brand launch in Kenya as well and we have similar plans for other markets too. At present, we are focused on spending time in planning and being execution ready for the upcoming launches across the geographies.