How Tally Solutions is making biz management a seamless & connected experience

Set up in the year 1986, Tally Solutions, a pioneer in the business software products industry, has been offering simple yet powerful products which have been transforming the way businesses are run. It has been delivering path breaking technology consistently for over three decades. Tally has become a a symbolism of leadership and innovation that is unmatched. Today, it caters to the needs of over 7 million customers in more than 100 countries across industries and has more than 2 million customer licenses which are activated worldwide.

With one of the largest partner ecosystems in the country, Tally has over 28,000 partners associated with it directly, providing delightful and seamless customer experience.

Recently, Tally Solutions launched a new ad film, ‘Tarakki Khushiyon Ki’, which emphasies on the fact that not all profits are monetary and that it is equally important to effectively manage business and spend time with family, especially during the festivals. It has also partnered with TVF Timeliners for a brand new mini-series, titled ‘Baap Beta Aur Office’.

In conversation with Adgully, Jayati Singh, Chief Marketing Officer at Tally Solutions, speaks at length about supporting and helping the MSME community, emerging trends in B2B marketing, collaboration with Social Panga, and much more. Edited excerpts:

Please tell us more about Tally Solutions’ latest campaign. What is the objective behind the campaign?

June 27 is recognised as the International MSME Day. Given the fact that Tally for the last 35 years has been working with and towards supporting and helping the MSME community at large in terms of business management, it seemed to us that it’s the ideal platform to recognize and celebrate the MSMEs, especially in India and in the later years we decided that we have to take it global as well. In 2017, this thing was established, but it was 2019 when we started really owning this space in terms of having a campaign, such as firstly it was Champions of Growth, then it was Heroes Hamesha, and this time we launched the campaign Always AweSME.

The whole intent around this has not been anything which is business focused, product focused but the intent has primarily been to bring out, recognize and celebrate the stories of so many MSMEs across the world in India, in all the corners of the country, not just the metros but really small towns, from where we get stories which can really inspire other entrepreneurs, stories of grit, stories of innovation, amazing leadership. That is the genesis of doing MSME Honours or rather MSME Day campaign.

In the last three years, we have been continuously doing this, it started out with the digital ad, going out into the market, meeting our customers, giving them a thank you card. Then we evolved last year to having MSME Honours also instituted, it was a series of awards that we gave out to entrepreneurs from across the country, in five various categories and these categories we intended to not make one of the common ones, but really look at areas where people would find inspiration, people would find something different. So, we have cases where people have done some tremendous work in the social realm, they have come out with innovations, they have adopted technology in a really wonderful manner. Thus, there are a lot of things that have happened, lot of inspiring women entrepreneur stories, that is how we associated and called in nominations from all these entrepreneurs, we associated with a lot of constitutions and associations from across the country and got the nominations in and then we had a series of events across the country, in international markets, we felicitated all these winners. So, it became like a huge campaign for us, which focused on nothing but celebrating the entrepreneurial spirit of this segment.

What are the trends that you have observe in the B2B marketing arena?

Covid has been a disruptor. For a couple of years we have seen budgets getting realigned. There was a lot more spends that were happening on digital, on engaging more with the customers. This was the time when a lot of B2B companies focused more on own brand building and the idea behind the brand building was really introspecting a bit more, look at what are the causes that appeal and resonate with the customers, and it’s been a myth for a long time that B2B brands and marketing are more around being rational, and very product focused and very functional, whereas B2C is about emotional connect. Increasingly, B2B brands and B2B marketing is getting shifted and geared towards having an emotional association with their customers and clients. That is leading to lot of personalised communication and marketing, the first one being B2B companies have been focusing more on the brand building, and developing an emotional connect. The second one being having greater need for personalized marketing and communication, even at Tally, we have been doing campaigns which are focusing on the intent of the customers and basis that intent we are delivering the right message to them in the form they would want to consume.

We know there is a shift which is happening towards video content viewing, so how do we make it more engaging, more interesting for our customers to engage with, is something we are working on. The other aspect is to be able to personalize it basis the intent, there is a greater degree of requirement for knowing the customer well and having the customer insights. To be able to do, there has to be understanding what the customer journey is, doing primary researches, secondary researches to really map out or construct the customer journey and get insights out of it and then developing the marketing plan is the third thing that I think in B2B marketing is becoming increasingly critical, specifically for Tally, because we have a huge partner network.

The fourth really important thing that we are seeing is really equipping, enabling and encouraging our partner base to get even more digitised. So, the whole digital transformation that we have been hearing about, talking of, even for the partner network, it has been very strong action point from our end. Helping them to focus and drive, doing demos, generating leads or nurturing leads, all these have become of critical importance.

Last, but not the least, is the focus on customer relations – the whole customer management bit, because in the last two years, when there was very little face to face interaction and engagement, how do you keep in touch with the customers, without either bombarding them with too much information, how do you keep the engagement and conversation going. That has become quite critical, the knowledge nuggets, by means of some really meaningful webinars, content sharing has become extremely important. We will see more of why content is king. People in B2B also consume meaningful product related, educational content and also content that connects with them at an emotional level, rational level. Those are some of the critical things and areas that we see important for B2B marketing.

What are the challenges and opportunities in B2B marketing?

One challenge is accessing data across so many platforms. You have people getting into your customer journey at any point. And there are various touchpoints where you have your customer service centre, call centres, web pages, where leads are generated or people fill up the forms or the product engagement or through sales, or through service. Really accessing data and having a unified customer view is very critical and important. The second thing is giving a good customer experience. We do measure our customer satisfaction levels at various points, but through each of those touch points how happy are the customers left, that is important to map. So, we do a lot of things internally at Tally, for instance.

When we are looking at our customer response and feedback, we look at it over the tenure of the customer over a period of time and across various touch points to get an understanding of when they got the demo, how did they feel, how was their buying experience, then how has their product usage experience been, if they have made any calls to the call centres, how has that experience has been? It is all about getting that feedback.

The third critical challenge is that since the decision journey is fairly long in B2B, the focus on lead nurturing becomes extremely critical. When you are nurturing that lead over a period of time, you have to keep the right balance of sharing information, which will aid the customer in making a decision and bombarding them with too much content and messaging may disturb them. That whole process of lead nurturing is also extremely important and that can be at times challenging as well.

Every B2B company grapples with generating good quality leads, with so much happening in digital marketing through performance marketing and campaigns, how do we constantly keep ensuring good quality leads get generated which cross your qualification process, and get to an early closure.

Tally Solutions has collaborated with Social Panga. Could you elaborate on the association?

It goes without saying that social presence and working across that is very important and also to have a constant connect and engagement with the customers. We have doing a lot of things in house and we have a great team of digital marketers. With Social Panga, the whole intent really has been to get them to work on some specific social handles, for India and a couple of international geographies, primarily to get a good outside in perspective as well.

In the last few years we have seen some tremendous growth in our own follower base. We have seen all the efforts that we have been putting in across the social handles really resulting in very good engagement and brand perception results. With Social Panga, we want to take it a notch higher, to get in more fresh perspective from outside and maybe help reduce stress on the internal team.

How is B2B tech marketing different and what has worked well for Tally Solutions?

For the longest time, the line is now blurring between B2B and B2C. Because at the end of the day, when your medium and platform are becoming similar, which is primarily now you are still engaging with people, for businesses like Tally where we are engaging directly with micro, small enterprises, in that case the engagement with the customer is also at an individual level. I may be consuming content at an individual level, but I also own a company. Specifically for B2B tech marketing, a lot of focus that we lay on, given our domain and expertise in the area, is on educational marketing, influencer marketing, and of course, experiential marketing. When I say education, I think the whole focus on automation, on why it is good and also given that it is also government priority, to get people more digitised. There is a lot of awareness that still needs to be created. There are a lot of schemes that the government keeps coming out with that a lot of people are not aware of. So, we conduct these sessions with MSMEs, with experts in the industry and domain, purely from a thought leadership perspective, to acquaint them with all those things that are happening new, in the compliance realm, in the financial domain, in general business and book-keeping areas as well.

There are people practicing taxation, there are people who are in the era of bloggers, there are opinion leaders we have in the business domain, there are entrepreneurs who are there as influencers, the idea is to really work them, understand the needs of the MSME segment, get them also to engage with these MSMEs to create more awareness, not just about Tally, but the need to digitise or to meet and on compliance itself.

Being a B2B company, the whole focus on really optimising our digital marketing to ensure that the demand generation, the lead generation, the management system works is equally critical.

What are the new marketing activities that have been launched by Tally Solutions?

Recently, we had a brand launch in Kenya and it was received quite well by the customers there. In the UAE, Middle East markets, the focus has been on invoicing and really getting people to automate there as well. For India, for the coming few quarters, we have the product roadmap well in place and we are having a couple of new launches coming in this financial year and that is going to be our focus around our product marketing. Apart from that, currently we are also focusing on talking about and driving greater adoption of our new product Tally Prime, which has seen tremendous success otherwise in the market and we are just focusing on popularising it even more and get more and more people to sort of adopt it.

In a software product, you would be typically getting some or the other enhancements happening. Earlier this year, we launched Tally Prime on AWS and we know that anytime, anywhere access is of critical value to the customer. This collaboration with AWS, through our partners, has been received extremely well and it kind of ensures that the core of both the organisations in terms of giving the connected solution to the customers and with thorough security and privacy, we are catering to that element in a perfect manner. So that has been a focus on Tally’s collaboration with AWS. Again in the year end we will have our Release 3.O. with Tally Prime.

What are the future plans of Tally Solutions?

Our key focus has always been providing the best experience for our customers. Any kind of feedback on product enhancements, functionality increase, those things continue to remain our key prerogatives and basis that we schedule our product launches. Going forward, we are talking about a very connected environment, it is more in terms of looking at the various aspects of compliance that currently exists, and how to ensure it is absolutely seamless for our customers, from the time they raise an invoice to reaching the supplier and then the payments coming in to them, filing their GSTR, getting things updated to making life really simple with e-invoicing. The whole cycle of business management in a very compliant environment, how do we make that as a very seamless and connected experience, that is the core on which we at Tally are currently working on.