Founded in 1986 by two MSME industry stalwarts- Bharat Goenka and his father, Shyam Sunder Goenka, Tally Solutions came into existence due to the Goenkas’ need for a computing program which could help the cotton textile company maintain its books of accounts seamlessly.
Enthusiastic about coding, when Bharat Goenka began working on the program and presented the same to Shyam Sunder Goenka, it was found out that the program had been designed in a way that was convenient for the son to design rather than being convenient to work upon.
Citing a prominent quote, “When I’m driving a car, I want to be the driver and not the mechanic”, Jayati Singh, Global Chief Marketing Officer, Tally Solutions, mentioned that this small computing hiccup was what led to the birth of a customer-centric book-keeping platform which would strive to make the user’s life easier as opposed to the programmer’s life, especially for MSMEs.
That being said, today Tally Solutions not only understands insights but also recognizes the usage patterns of the various businesses that it caters to from an audience POV and focuses on making its users’ lives easier.
Cut to 33 years later, when Singh joined the B2B business software company in 2019 as the Global Chief Marketing Officer, what the brand needed was not awareness as the software itself had been known in the spaces of accounting and compliance, but the brand purpose of making everyone who touches Tally Solutions happier.
“Our brand purpose is as simple as it sounds. It stems from the fact that no matter who in the ecosystem works with Tally Solutions, be it a partner, customer or user using the product; someone who is reaching out to the customer care department or even someone who is selling the product to a customer, we want each and every of our usage and interaction with the customer to leave him/her with some sort of happiness and delight,” she said.
She also emphasized that this purpose driven philosophy also extends to the designing and sale of each of Tally Solutions’ products and said, “If we feel that any of our products are not useful or suitable to the business, we tell the customer upfront and then refrain from closing the deal.”
Delving deeper into the purpose quotient, Singh also pointed out that Tally Solutions’ products are lifelong and require a user/consumer to pay once, and that the company only charges minimal amount for renewal of its services and/or additional service and upgrades each year so that the end user is always happy from the usage.
But for a company whose purpose is at the fulcrum, the initiatives go way beyond pricing- to celebrate and share the story of some of the many brilliant MSMEs on the occasion of International MSME day, i.e.- June 27, by awarding selected winners and providing a platform for their mentorship and then keep the celebrations alive throughout the year with different content pieces.
“When we call a company a startup, it becomes head-to-head with business, but when we call them MSMEs there’s a bit of baggage that comes with it, interestingly. Hence, our idea, with MSME Honours was to bring out the lesser-known stories of MSMEs from comparatively smaller regions like Tier II and III cities and encourage them to come out and participate in the selected five categories on the basis of wherever they are making a difference. Moreover, it’s a completely no-profit no-gains kind of thing for us to recognize that MSMEs shouldn’t just be limited to a day but celebrated year-round,” she said.
Throwing light onto the evolution of MSME Honours till date, she stated that the same has grown exponentially in the last four years, of which only the first edition happened online and amassed a total of 1000 entries and the remaining three years wherein it happened offline, the entries grew to 2,000 in the second edition and closed at about 5,000 in the last edition.
This time around, she mentioned that the company is hopeful that the nominations would double owing to word of mouth, the audience connect and its close to 20,000 members’ partner network seeing value in the same from a visibility and promotion standpoint.
“Unlike other events which take place on MSME day and have very little mileage of just a single day, what we have tried to do with MSME Honours is give our existing and prospective customers an opportunity to not just nominate themselves for the awards but also showcase their offerings on the marketplace we hold at our events. Additionally, we also ensure that all the winners’ stories are also amplified on our social media handles as well as inviting relevant industry members as spokesperson at our events,” she added.
The nominations for the fourth edition of MSME Honours are open now, and interested participants can send in their entries for categories like- Wonder Women, Business Maestro, NewGen Icon, Tech Transformer, and Champion of Cause, before May 31, 2024, to be eligible to participate in the award show.
What’s new this year at the event, as per Singh, is that Tally Solutions is now going to conduct panel discussions and speed mentoring sessions taking place on every table with an aim to give the MSMEs a chance to engage and interact with experts in specific business domains.
“What we in turn hope and have managed to do to quite an extent with MSME Honours is have a cross-germination of ideas, sharing of success stories and giving a platform to people to interact and learn from others,” she mentioned.
Commenting on how such brand events and initiatives help in the overall brand building process, Tally Solutions’ Singh stated that since Tally is a product, the case has been such that the brand has always been the product and the product has been the brand.
“This is not always a great thing because your product experience cannot define what the brand stands for as the product in itself isn’t the only thing that contributes to it but the overall experience that users or consumers have and what the brand is working towards is all a part of the holistic brand building exercise,” she said.
But because Tally Solutions, as a brand, is focused on creating technology that empowers the MSMEs and entrepreneurs through the entire compliance shifts and be a partner for most businesses to drive the transition, doing what is right and good for our customers is extremely crucial.
“At a brand level, our intent with MSME Honours has been to thank them through the celebration of their success and showcasing their success stories as it is owing to their existence that we’re thriving. Additionally, we’re also putting forth our whole purpose to the forefront here in order to percolate the same to our partners by providing them a chance to network and showcase. Similarly, on the domain or category level, the event helps us in terms of brand and thought leadership for us as a company. The main crux of the event lies in the vision that Tally Solutions doesn’t want to be known just for its product, but also for its purpose,” she emphasized.
Upon being questioned on why the brand has expanded MSME Honours from India to include markets like UAE, KSA, Kenya, Bangladesh and Nepal, she replied that since these regions have been the focus markets for the brand since the inception and therefore Tally Solutions in these regions has a stronger presence and good partner network and coverage, which is why the event made more sense to begin with in these markets.
Moving on to the advertising and promotion budgets allocation for the year, Singh mentioned that since the business goals of the company are higher than that of the previous years, Tally Solutions has duly increased its annual ad budgets. However, operating in the B2B space, its larger focus lies in BTL, and digital initiatives as compared to pure ATL advertising.
“At Tally Solutions, we do both product marketing as well as do brand marketing. And while MSME Honors is our brand marketing effort, at the product marketing level, it’s all about the product usage, new features, benefits around compliance and more. As a brand, we have to do marketing and create content, which is relevant to our customers, albeit it on the lines of educating them about the domain and the prevalent practices or even showing plain functional product features and benefits,” she clarified.
Moreover, Singh also highlighted that despite the domain that the brand operates in, i.e.- Finance, it doesn’t need to be supremely serious in its communications and therefore the idea is to build in a little bit of humor to engage better with the audiences.
Recently, the brand also partnered with TVF for two seasons of its show- ‘Half CA’ as the storyline or script of the same just fitted seamlessly with the brand’s idea of focusing on startups and the larger ecosystem. And since it’s majorly the youth who consumes such content, the brand along with its product functionality did fit in very subtly from a branded content POV.
“Our collaboration with TVF on Half CA also worked beautifully with our CA community as they just loved the references and we were able to bring to life the brand imagery of not taking itself and the category of finance too seriously,” she pointed out.
On a forward-looking note, Singh stated that out of the total addressable market of 65 million, Tally Solutions’ customer base comprising licensed users as of now stands at 2.5 million businesses, which essentially means that only 30% of the total audience is being able to use the product aptly, however the functionality of the product is quite deep and immense. Hence, the idea is to increase the user base to 3.5 million businesses across all of the brand’s ten markets.
Concludingly, she also mentioned that the other two priorities for the brand as of now is to establish a strong influencer and evangelist connect to not just stay relevant but engage in a two-way communication to understand what more the company needs to do in terms of both- its products and services and ensuring that the whole customer management practice is such that the company stays in touch with its consumer base even after selling the product and eventually to turn everybody into advocates of Tally Solutions.
