Tally Solutions is a tech and innovation-led company providing business management software globally, giving the iconic brand a fresh voice, new energy, and a bold identity built for the next-gen business builder.
This is more than a logo refresh, it’s a strategic shift in tone, tribe, and tech, says the company. Jayati Singh, Chief Marketing Officer & Interim India Business Head, Tally Solutions, in an interview with Medianews4u.com, brings a unique POV on what it takes to evolve a brand that’s both deeply trusted and newly dynamic.
Q. Could you talk about the factors that prompted the brand refresh that Tally Solutions has done? What are the various facets to it?
Tally has been synonymous with accounting and business management, being a household name in the ecosystem of Indian enterprises. Tally’s brand refresh is twofold. Firstly, to communicate its evolution from just Tally as a name that implies accounting and business management to a name recognised for its trusted core product and services.
Tally has substantiated this business evolution with technology and various verticals. The verticals include Tally Prime, Tally Education (that delivers certified courses), Tally Edge (an aggregator platform), and Tally Capital (a lending platform) forming a cohesive ecosystem brought under a unified brand identity: the House of Tally. This consolidation reflects the evolution from a product-led company to a technology-led brand, offering comprehensive financial solutions and education across sectors.
Q. Could you talk about the brainstorming that happened with the creative agencies and the brief given to boost the brand’s relevance?
Tally pursued a collaborative initiative with their creative agency, executed under a strategic framework, to reinstate a match between the brand’s external identity and their historic internal ethos and purpose. Using the guidance from the agency, Tally was specific that the refresh was beyond a traditional logo update; it explicitly leaned into expressing what Tally is (a technology company driven by heart, powered by mind).
At the core of the exercise, Tally noted that everyone and anyone who interacts with Tally as a customer, as an employee or partner should feel happier at the end of the interaction. To make this more tangible internally, Tally reconvened its core values: honour, nurture, master and create that shape every interaction, product design and promise made by the company.
Once the internal canvas was established, the agency worked to stimulate the intrinsic meaning of Tally and realise the refreshed visual identity. Essentially, the agency aimed to draw a clear correlation from the new brand’s visual cues that articulated a cohesive look and feel across each touchpoint that would distinguish the House of Tally.
The new visual identity, including a carefully selected colour palette allocated to each category, was meant to amplify audience connections and maintain relevance in a dynamic place.
Q. The gameplan is to think like a startup — but with the wisdom of three decades behind it. Does this entail rethinking processes including marketing, client acquisition, retention, and expanding product lines?
Tally’s approach is to operate like a startup while adopting the level of wisdom and stability built from three decades of experience. This mindset shapes how the company is constantly rethinking its delivery models across marketing, client acquisition, client retention and product evolution. True to its reputation as a client-first organization, Tally’s teams are constantly on-site with clients to remain aligned with their evolving needs.
Tally continues to implement client retention solutions internally at the enterprise level and through its partner channel with over 1,200 certified partners across the country. For values alignment and customer engagement, Tally implements robust Customer Management Programmes, as well as engages with partners in developing a vision for inspiring workplaces, reducing attrition, and upgrading skills.
Regular training and capability development initiatives, both internally and for partner teams, underline Tally’s action to uphold relevancy, efficiency, and responsiveness to what matters most to its clients.
Q. While many chase trends, Tally’s brand transformation is rooted in purpose, reliability, and future-readiness. How does this give it an edge over the competition, and how is the company shifting its marketing focus from campaigns to conversations?
The transformation of Tally’s brand stands apart in an industry filled with transient brands chasing fleeting trends. The main purpose is to be anchored in purpose, reliability, and being future-ready, which has been the company’s foundation for nearly four decades.
The core of the transformation is rooted in its unwavering customer-first philosophy and the belief of founder Mr. Shyam Sunder Goenka that business owners should spend time focusing on operating their business and not figuring out how technology works. Product design is an extension of this belief, emphasizing simplicity and usability, championing business operations and not the life of a coder.
Aligned with this philosophy, Tally’s marketing communication strategy is just like its product design, taking the shift from one-time campaigns to ongoing, relevant, and meaningful conversation. The focus is to engage its audience on a continuous basis, taking the always-active approach using digital and social media to engage its audience, with relevant education, and contribute to community-led learning programmes.
Tally understands that present-day audiences in B2B expect knowledge and engagement. Tally hopes to keep its audience engaged with purposeful and informative content, to build trust and intending to bring them closer to the brand, to keep Tally always relevant and elevated above competitors.
Q. Could you talk about marketing activities and innovations lined up in the coming months?
Tally has an ambitious line-up of marketing activities and initiatives planned for the coming months. One of the highlights is the Tally MSME Honours, now in its fifth edition and bigger than ever before. This flagship initiative highlights inspiring stories of MSMEs from all parts of India to all international markets where Tally operates, namely the Middle East, Nepal, Africa and Bangladesh. Building on last year’s success, which saw over 20,000 nominations, Tally aims to expand the reach to seven cities in India and further strengthen its international presence. The campaign reinforces the idea that all successful journeys start with one spark – one idea, one email, one trigger.
In addition to the Tally MSME Honours, Tally also marks CA Day with its strong Chartered Accountant community, who play a key role in shaping India’s compliance ecosystem and driving economic growth. Alongside these principal events, Tally will continue to roll out focussed product and partner marketing strategies, and increased visibility across cities, including airports, to reach different audiences.
Q. What is the gameplan when it comes to experiential marketing?
Tally has always positioned experiential marketing at the heart of its growth strategy. As one of India’s pioneering software product companies, it has always understood that the real strength of its solution is in how easily and effectively users will experience it.
Right from the early days, Mr. Shyam Sunder Goenka and Mr. Bharath Goenka, the founders, were demonstrating the software to business owners with individually assembled computers, sometimes transported on scooters or rickshaws, as computers were a precious commodity, and demonstrating first-hand how the software could automate and simplify accounting.
This passion continues to this day through hands-on immersive demos and tools for self-discovery. Tally has extended its investment in experiential demos through its website to give prospective users simulation experiences and demo modules to try out genuine scenarios. For Tally, providing users with relatable hands-on experiences is at the heart of driving trust and adoption for organisations.
Q. Could you shed light on Tally’s social media strategy, and will educational content be key?
Tally has developed a consistent social media strategy over the years, working closely to define the specifics of each platform – Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter. Audience profiling and understanding engagement trends are central to this approach.
One significant area of focus is educational and knowledge-focused content, as Tally is a domain leader. The obvious “knock-on” effect is what Tally prefers, content which enables its audience to stay informed about compliance updates, changes, and best practices to enable them to manage finances, cash flow, or inventory. To create community value, Tally hosts regular webinars, expert sessions and engaging events for online and offline engagement for ongoing community engagement.
Q. Could you talk about the importance of using media and entertainment formats to market the company and get the message across?
Tally understands the value of using media and entertainment formats to engage its audience more meaningfully, understanding that at the heart of every business, there are people who engage with content on social and digital platforms.
While not its primary marketing focus, Tally has effectively leveraged this approach in the past through strategic partnerships with TVF (The Viral Fever) on popular series like ‘Pitchers’ and then supported ‘Well Done, CA Sahab’, a movie script written by one of Tally’s chartered accountants. By aligning with content that resonates with the CA community and wider audience, Tally ensures it stays relevant and connected to its users in formats they naturally consume.
Q. Could you talk about work that Tally does on the audio front? Any plans of exploring the podcast avenue?
Tally has already ventured into audio with its podcast series ‘Tally Ke Saath Business Ki Baat’, although the initiative was slightly ahead of its time. The organization continues to see potential in this medium and is focused on creating content that is highly relevant.
In Dubai, Tally’s team is already working on a like-based series featuring some successful entrepreneurs they work with there. In India, the company is mindful of how its podcasts can stand out in a crowded space to provide useful and engaging insights. The conversations that Managing Director Tejas Goenka and Executive Director Nupur Goenka have with entrepreneurs provide valuable insights into what businesses are doing, and Tally is eager to launch more podcast content in the future based on these learnings.
Q. What role will partnerships with finfluencers play in driving conversations?
Tally occasionally partners with influencers, but prefers to partner with a strong network of chartered accountants (CAs) who hold strong influence in the industry. This network serves as Tally’s voice by creating conversations to educate and generate awareness around Tally’s products and solutions.
As an example, Tally works with a CA whose content alone has created or influenced more than 7-8 million views. The company’s emphasis is on partnering with micro-bloggers and local influencers to make sure the messaging is concentrated and impactful in different regions around the country.
Q. How has AI been integrated into Tally in areas like maintaining data privacy?
Tally Solutions maintains some of the best data security practices for financial software, which has helped build lasting trust with its customers. The platform is designed in a way that ensures the user’s data is inaccessible to unauthorized parties and does not have default cloud storage, which supports the privacy and integrity of sensitive financial data.
Although AI is not currently used in the Tally platform to increase data security, Tally is exploring using AI-enabled features to enhance operations and user experience. For example, Tally is enabling users to take a picture of an invoice and have it automatically converted into structured data in the Tally system.
Once the data is in the Tally environment, it remains secure as per the platform’s robust protection mechanisms. AI, in this context, plays a role in simplifying data entry and improving usability without compromising on security.
Q. How will Tally strengthen its relationship with the thousands of partners it works with across countries, and what role does data analytics play in this area?
Tally partners closely with their partners and the partner resources. Tally strengthens its partnerships through long-standing collaboration, regular certification, and training programmes. Tally has been providing partners with tools such as the Customer Management Programme (CMP) to go along with the primary objective of making sure that partners have the right customer engagement tools to engage their customer base effectively during product updates or to comply with changes in the law regarding product use.
They also provide marketing collateral, developing the right messaging to take to market, run the Tally Accelerator Programme with dedicated accelerated partners who assist partners with hiring and training support, and offer continuous upskilling on product knowledge and client management.
Certified partners are regularly engaged through in-person meetings and events to maintain strong connections. Apart from that, there are numerous training and skill upgrading programmes for the partner resources to make sure that they know the product and other soft skills.
Q. In the coming couple of years, where is the whitespace for growth?
Tally Solutions plans to grow from the current base of 2.5 million users to over three million business users globally in the next two years. The company aims to achieve an over 30 % year-on-year growth rate for both domestic markets and international markets.
Key growth drivers include a robust product roadmap that is compliance-focused with enhancements to the product, user experience, and a renewed sense of brand position. Campaigns like “Everything Tallys” make the communication clear; it can be work life, it can be accounts, balance sheet, everything tallies because you have such a convenient thing on your fingertips. This ensures increased visibility through outdoor media to drive awareness, engagement and sales.
Q. What are the key markets being targetted for the campaign?
Tally has picked up zones in more than 25 – 30 cities where outdoor campaigns can be seen in the form of hoardings, bus shelters and in some cases print and airport visibility across the country.
Q. Has digital made OOH more attractive, and what is your view on television as an advertising medium?
Digital has added benefits to out-of-home (OOH) advertising, particularly in high-traffic locations, like airports, with engaging, animated, and dynamic displays. While television is a mass medium with strong potential, Tally Solutions, with 99% brand recall, is strategy-focused rather than broad-based TV campaigns to reach out to the customers and client base.
Q. How does Tally Solutions measure marketing effectiveness, and is pricing frequently adjusted?
Tally Solutions gauges marketing effectiveness through tangible metrics like call tracking via partner numbers and monitoring search volumes and website traffic in active markets. On pricing, Tally maintains a simple, transparent model with two main SKUs: the Silver license for single users and the legacy Multi-User license.
It also has a subscription option that provides annual upgrades and access, but the core product is a perpetual license. Tally Solutions embodies simplicity, avoiding any kind of complexity. Pricing changes are rare and only incremental, usually going with the market and the inflation of the cost to serve, which are made through minor adjustments now and then.
