
Tally Solutions has worn the same logo for nearly four decades—and its chief marketing officer, Jayati Singh, insists that’s no accident. While the world of branding is awash with sleek redesigns and minimalistic rebrands, the business management software company has stubbornly—and strategically—stuck with its familiar emblem.
The attachment runs deep. Singh recalls that long-time channel partners, and even one of the company’s earliest employees, have literally tattooed the logo on themselves. But this isn’t a case of nostalgia holding back progress.
Since she joined in 2020, the brand has pursued incremental refreshes—tidying up the look, sharpening uniformity—without abandoning the essence of its identity. With 2.5 million customers and 7 million users, Singh explains, Tally wasn’t willing to risk alienating loyalists, especially when the affection for the brand borders on cult-like. The bigger rethink, she hints, will come only when Tally unveils a truly transformative leap in its product roadmap.
From ledgers to legacy
Since its origin in 1988, Tally has been synonymous with helping India’s MSMEs digitise their accounting processes. Its positioning as ‘the father of the Indian software product industry’—a title conferred by NASSCOM on its founder Bharat Goenka in 2011—has anchored its credibility in a category often perceived as technical and dry.
The challenge today lies in speaking to two very different cohorts: a loyal base that prizes trust, reliability and familiarity, and a new generation of millennial and Gen Z entrepreneurs who demand agility, simplicity and speed.
“The biggest challenge for a 40-year-old company is to balance legacy while staying relevant with newer audiences,” Singh says. “Our focus was to ensure that audiences across all ages associate with the brand without alienating existing users.”
Reaching distinct audience groups with customised messaging is tough; equally complex is filtering prospects, guiding them through the funnel, and converting them into loyal customers.
Tally, she argues, has had to shift perceptions of MSMEs themselves. Too often described as ‘resilient’ or ‘struggling’, Singh insists that these businesses are dynamic and thriving, powering India’s economic engine. The company’s messaging is now anchored in enabling tomorrow’s businesses while remaining rooted in authenticity.
Speaking in many tongues
If the audience is diverse, the marketing has had to follow suit. MSMEs in Bengaluru have very different needs from those in Kochi or Kanpur. That prompted Tally to shift from product-led marketing to brand-led storytelling.
“In the FMCG companies that I worked with earlier, one always talked about a primary and secondary audience. At Tally, our target audience comprises 63 million MSMEs, so how do we keep it straightforward?” Singh says. “Instead of talking more about the benefits, we talk about peace of mind or focus on growing the business than getting caught in the chaos of everyday operations.”
This shift has led to regionally tailored campaigns through what Tally calls “focus-city marketing.” Rather than roll out standardised media from its Bangalore headquarters, the company designs localised communication, sometimes highlighting the fact that the majority of invoices in India are processed through Tally.
Parallelly, the company has sought cohesion across its multiple verticals—Tally Education, TallyPrime and TallyCapital—by standardising the brand and design language while using different colours to signal different functions. The aim, Singh says, was to ensure that partners, influencers and even micro-evangelists projected the brand with consistency.
Storytelling over selling
In a B2B category dominated by specifications, compliance features and partner incentives, Tally has sought to inject emotion and narrative. Campaigns such as #StartsWithOne and ‘Easy as 1-2-3’ shift the focus from selling software to telling stories of entrepreneurs and their aspirations.
Singh draws on her B2C experience at P&G and Philips to frame Tally’s approach. “Tally is actually as close as you can get to B2C marketing because our offerings are for smaller businesses. The decision makers are the actual users. With social media’s advent, you have various touch points where you can talk as individuals, not as a business entity,” she says.
One initiative, MSME Honours, captures real-life narratives from entrepreneurs, with 20,000 nominations in its fifth year and seven-city events amplified through a partnership with Hindustan Times. For Singh, the impact lies beyond vanity metrics: “We relied on the idea to have a solid connect because so much storytelling can happen in this business segment.”
The influencer equation
B2B brands have long shied away from influencer-driven marketing, but Tally has leaned into it. Webinars on compliance and cashflow, content created by chartered accountants and partners, and micro-bloggers reviewing new product updates now form part of the brand’s marketing mix.
“Some years ago, Tally’s YouTube had two pages with content created by CAs, partners and general evangelists. Since there are these vocal people with good following, we decided to run specific programmes, like Tally Connect and Tally Anchors, where we work with micro bloggers or influencers at regional and zonal level,” Singh explains.
The results, she claims, are tangible. Tally has recently crossed one million followers globally, with monthly growth of 15,000–20,000 followers and significantly higher engagement rates on influencer-led posts compared with standard content. Campaigns such as TVF’s Baap Beta Aur Office and the placement in Pitchers also underscored the pivot toward pop-culture relevance. “B2B marketing is not boring; it can be made engaging and that is what we've been trying,” Singh says.
Battling attention deficit
If LinkedIn’s 2025 research is to be believed, 90% of B2B marketers in India cite “attention” as their biggest challenge. Singh recognises the paradox: “It’s an interesting dichotomy that on one hand, we have an attention deficit and on the other, we have the binge-watching syndrome.”
Tally’s response has been to create content that bifurcates audiences—serious decision-makers get functional, no-nonsense knowledge, while younger cohorts encounter the brand in more entertaining formats. The strategy is to avoid gimmickry while staying simple, quirky and consistent with Tally’s core.
Digital now accounts for 40–50% of the company’s marketing spend, a dramatic increase over pre-COVID years when SEO, blogs and basic digital presence dominated. The remainder is split across BTL and ATL initiatives such as OOH, airport activations and partner-focused events. Experiential marketing remains central, with more than 1,200 certified partners and 20,000 channel partners amplifying Tally’s reach.
Global markets and local lessons
Despite its scale, Tally remains heavily reliant on India, which contributes 85–90% of its business. The software is sold in over 90 countries, but the UAE stands out as its largest overseas market, with a 40–50% share and strong adoption driven by compliance standards and ICAI’s local presence.
Other growth territories include Saudi Arabia, Bangladesh and Africa. “For example, in Africa, we are currently in Kenya, but are spreading in different parts of East Africa too. We do localised campaigns taking into account local insights and requirements,” Singh says.
APAC, despite its potential and Indian diaspora, has been approached more cautiously. “We thoroughly studied Indonesia to figure out the market, but language and compliance readiness become critical. Otherwise, it’s partial adoption. Looking at our priorities and roadmap, it’s time we focus more on India and Middle East and continue to monitor APAC,” Singh adds.
Martech and the self-directed buyer
The shift in B2B buyer behaviour post-COVID has shaped both Tally’s martech stack and its content strategy. Singh notes a rise in self-directed, personalised digital journeys, prompting Tally to invest in demos and online experiences designed to show how simple the software can be.
“Because ours is a technological product, people tend to think there’s a lot of learning involved. We have put web and online demos for our customers so they can see how simple it is to use for a self-discovery digital journey,” she explains.
That simplicity is central to Tally’s global narrative, where subscription-heavy competitors can appear complicated. Tally’s positioning instead emphasises ease of use, single licences and straightforward compliance.
Tally’s marketing journey reveals a company grappling with a paradox familiar to many legacy B2B brands: how to modernise without alienating loyalists. Its strategy—localisation, influencer engagement, emotional storytelling and digital acceleration—shows how even categories rooted in specifications can adopt consumer-style branding.
Yet the balancing act is ongoing. As Singh herself points out, the company will not risk a wholesale rebrand until its product roadmap justifies it. In the meantime, it will continue to pursue incremental refreshes, build regional campaigns and test formats that cut through the scroll fatigue.
Legacy, however valuable, is no moat in a market defined by speed, attention scarcity and millennial entrepreneurs. The companies that will endure are those that, like Tally, can stitch reliability with relevance—while keeping their tattoos intact.