Tally – a trusted business advisor for SMEs

Jyothsna Pai 
Global Head, Marketing
Tally Solutions Pvt Ltd

Brand Positioning vs. Marketing Tactics 

For Tally, a brand is not just an advertising campaign but an experience that we deliver to our customers. Tally is the country’s leading business software provider, adopted by 1.5 million businesses. We have partners and customers who have been with us since the company’s early years. When you have such a strong support and faith from your customers, the brand strategy needs to go beyond just selling your product and invest in educating and guiding customers, and ultimately giving back to the businesses who have made you successful.

Transitioning to the GST regime was a tough period for SMEs. Tally’s key role as a brand was in engaging with SMEs through over 7000 GST camps across the country and educating them to understand GST and stay prepared to change. We also provided free webinars and engaged on social media and through blogs for a larger outreach. 

We believe in the power of simplicity: our brand, our product, the way we sell and service our customers, all reflect this core. This has enabled us to be adopted by businesses large or small.

Marketing plays a key role to position a brand and create relevancy in a customer’s life. And a powerful brand is made more successful by its loyal users by becoming its advocates. We are happy that Tally enjoys this status and are grateful for trust bestowed by millions of businesses globally. A successfully marketed brand also ensures that it constantly innovates not only on product and experience front, but also in the way it uses its channel mix and messaging to remain preferred in a changing environment.

Using Data for a Good Brand Strategy

Data and customer insights have been at the core of our brand and product strategy, enabling us to constantly innovate and simplify SME accounting and compliance needs in a dynamic market environment.Our experience with SMEs (Small and Medium Enterprises) pans 30 years. The last 3 decades have seen enormous changes in Technology, the advent of the digital era, and even 2 major Regulatory changes in indirect taxation - VAT and GST.

Every touch point we have, be it our network of partners across the country, our customers, digital assets, social and customer care responses, each continuously provides us with rich data and insights that help us understand the pulse of the market, using which we develop products that delight. This is in addition to the consumer researcheswe invest in to generate market insights on various parameters including usage habits, attitude, adoption, satisfaction, and segmentation.

Impact of Digitization on Businesses

Digitization provides a great opportunity to create engagement with customers in multiple ways -

•    Reach new customers that traditional channels could not reach 
•    Greater scope for engagement and virality
•    Trends like Big data and a connected world that provide great opportunities in simplifying the life of an accountant and an SME owner through connecting suppliers to customers, banks to businesses and also ease connectivity between Regulator(GSTN) and the business. Tally is soon looking at further simplifying an SME’s life through its array of connected solutions.

R&D driving Growth

Innovation is at the heart of our technology and has also been responsible for the impact our products and solutions have created. With our future roadmap of connected solutions, R&D is our core focus over the next few years. We have recently begun research operations as a specialized function. We have also institutionalized cloud operations to build and strengthen our GSP infrastructure to begin with and the foundations of our connected technology roadmap in the time to come. Mobility is also key on our radar and we have a dedicated team to walk the journey towards mobile solutions. All in all, we are looking at SMEs from a 360 degree view point and innovating with technology to make their lives simpler.