How a boutique insurance consultancy turned data transparency into higher client loyalty and recurring revenue.
Kelly Donahue-Piro is the owner and founder of Agency Performance Partners, a consulting firm that helps independent insurance agencies across the U.S. and Canada grow through better training, coaching, and operational processes. Her mission is clear: help agencies become more efficient, data-informed, and ultimately, more profitable.
Before adopting Databox, Agency Performance Partners faced a common but critical challenge: how to measure the impact of their training and consulting programs. They were relying heavily on spreadsheets and pivot tables to gather client data—a method that was time-consuming, error-prone, and difficult to scale.
Clients didn’t always have access to the data they needed, nor did they know what to do with it once they got it. “Without access to data, we didn’t know if our training was working. We were relying on feelings,” Kelly explained. The lack of clarity made it difficult to hold teams accountable, celebrate wins, or make informed adjustments.
Kelly knew her team needed a better way to democratize data across their client base. As a HubSpot partner, she was already familiar with ecosystems that prioritize usability and integrations, which led her to Databox.
“We needed something easy for us and our clients to use,” said Kelly. “We’re not data analysts. Our clients are salespeople. They need to see the number and know what to do.”
Databox hit all the right notes: user-friendly, affordable, scalable, and visual. More importantly, it allowed them to present data in a way that both trainers and agency teams could act on.
The team began by experimenting. At first, they built individual dashboards for each client—a process that quickly became unmanageable. Learning from these early missteps, they transitioned to templated dashboards based on system data, streamlined their processes, and started integrating Google BigQuery to handle larger datasets.
Databox provided onboarding support and dashboard setup assistance, but Kelly credits much of their success to her team’s willingness to iterate and learn by doing.
“The first version is never where you land,” she said. “You just have to start.”
Since implementing Databox, Agency Performance Partners has transformed the way they deliver value to clients:
Databox has become central to their offerings, even playing a key role in their company valuation. “It helped us create a scalable retainer product,” Kelly explained. “We couldn’t do what we do without it.”
“Your business will excel when you can have transparency of numbers and how you present that data. It has to be simple, clean, and flexible. If you’re not going to be a data company but need data to do your work, Databox is perfect.”
Kelly also shared a guiding philosophy: “Data is facts, not feelings. When you can see the data, there’s a different level of accountability and clarity for your team.”