REA Group

REA Group is a multinational digital advertising business specializing in property.

REA Group operates Australia’s leading residential and commercial property websites – realestate.com.au and realcommercial.com.au – as well as the leading website dedicated to sharing property, Flatmates.com.au, and Spacely, a short-term commercial and coworking property website. In addition, they own leading website properties across China, Singapore, US, and India. The REA Group is a public company listed on the Australian Stock Exchange (ASX: REA), and had A$820.3 million in FY2020 revenue. REA Group is majority-owned by News Corp Australia, a subsidiary of News Corp.

The Challenge

The team at REA knew there was a better solution for commissions management than continuing to rely on Excel. After evaluating three major software solutions in the market, Performio stood out for its strong customer support, cloud-native architecture, and powerful data transformation capabilities. Pricing was comparable to the other offerings, but the implementation time frame was much shorter and less expensive. In addition, the pre-built connectors to Salesforce and NetSuite were a positive factor, since they had deployed these systems the previous year for CRM and accounting.

“I had previously used Performio at another company, so I was familiar with its advantages and recommended that the team evaluate the solution,” recalls Geary. “After a thorough review of software options on the market, Performio also stood out for its ease of use and comparatively short implementation.”

The Results

REA deployed Performio in less than four months across four lines of business, residential, commercial, media, and developer. Today, the company uses Performio to calculate commissions for 165 users across the company. Dashboards are set up to show daily results, which has drastically reduced the number of queries by the sales team. The effort in managing post-commission calculations has been diminished.

“The sales team loves the visibility,” said Tim Delos Reyes, Data Analyst. “There is across the board acceptance of the system and the management team sees a direct link between the performance metrics built into the plan and the outcomes achieved. Performio helps us drive the behaviors and strategies we are using in sales.”

As a result of the increased visibility into their sales comp data, REA has changed payout rates and targets for account managers to directly improve revenue outcomes. Performio’s easy-to-use platform empowers sales directors to make changes to plans and react in a timely manner to changing market conditions.

“When we turned on the dashboards, people could see their weekly and daily reports, and take more control of their own fate and subsequent commission outcomes,” said Geary. “Every quarter we review reports to analyze how commissions are tracking vs. actual performance, assess strategies moving forward, add new products being brought to market, and tweak commission plans based on the effectiveness of the plans.”

“The experience we have had at REA with Performio has been very positive,” confirms Geary. “We tell people at other companies who are evaluating Performio that the time to market is better compared to other products and the flexibility of the solution is far superior. Furthermore, the same-day support and customer service are excellent.”