How to Improve MGA Distribution With Data: Lessons From Honeycomb Insurance

For most MGAs, agency distribution strategy still comes down to gut feel, historical relationships, and a spreadsheet that someone updates when they get around to it. The question ofwhichagencies to prioritize — andhow muchof their book you're actually capturing — rarely has a clean answer. And in a market where growth depends on putting the right resources behind the right partners, that blind spot is expensive.

Honeycomb Insurance decided to fix it.

The Challenge: Building a Distribution Strategy From the Ground Up

Launched in 2021, Honeycomb is an AI-native MGA built to modernize commercial real estate insurance. From day one, the company operated with a technology-first, efficiency-driven mindset — and held itself to that standard in every part of the business, including distribution.

But even with that orientation, Honeycomb faced the same challenge most MGAs do when it comes to agency targeting. In the words of Jon Repka, SVP of Sales and Revenue Operations at Honeycomb Insurance, "How do we now prioritize and force rank the entire large, hairy world of unappointed agencies into who we need to appoint next?"

The team needed an objective data framework — not just agency size or location, but something that could surface real addressable opportunity.

The Solution: A Data-Driven KPI Built on Ivans Insights

Honeycomb turned to Ivans Marketing Insights™ — a tool that gives MGAs and carriers access to industry-wide data on agency book composition, personal lines and commercial lines activity, and distribution performance.

What made it transformative wasn't just the data itself. It was how Honeycomb used it. The team built an internal KPI they calladdressable book of business size— a custom measure that factors in each agency's commercial lines book, their distribution across product lines and industries, and the realistic slice of that book addressable to a niche, habitational-focused MGA like Honeycomb.

"As a niche, HAB-focused carrier, we know that there's only going to be a small portion of a broad agency's book of business that is addressable to us," Repka explained. The addressable book of business KPI gave the team a more than directionally accurate way to evaluate every agency in their universe — and apply it across three use cases:

• Existing agencies:Separating top performers from bottom performers with objective data, not relationships
• Unappointed agencies:Building a prioritized, force-ranked prospecting list of who to appoint next
• Long-standing partners:Tracking year-over-year progress on wallet share growth

The result was a distribution strategy grounded in real data — and a qualification and targeting process sharp enough to move the needle on revenue.

The Outcome: 2X Revenue in the First 90 Days

The numbers validated the approach. After applying the addressable book of business lens to their agency onboarding and qualification process, Honeycomb more than doubled the revenue generated during a new agency's first 90-day onboarding period.

That's not a marginal improvement. That's a structural change in how distribution performance gets measured and managed.

Repka summed it up: Ivans Marketing Insights provided "a series of data points that I have not been able to find anywhere else when it comes to quantifying agency potential, quantifying agency performance, and arguably, most valuably, quantifying which agencies you need to go out and appoint next."

The Bigger Picture: A Holistic Approach to MGA Effectiveness

For Honeycomb, data-driven distribution didn't stop with Insights. The team also implemented Ivans Download™ — which pushes policy information directly into agents' management systems — and saw a 30% decrease in policy cancellations for Ivans-enabled agencies compared to a control group, alongside a lift in submission volume and a reduction in service tickets.

Together, the two products give Honeycomb a complete picture: smarter decisions about which agencies to prioritize, and a stronger experience for those agencies once they're on board.

"It's a truly holistic tool that touches all facets of our process, from planning to go-to-market to execution and customer success," Repka said.

What This Means for Your MGA

If your agency targeting strategy still relies on instinct or legacy relationships, Honeycomb's story is a reminder of what's possible when you bring the right data to the table. The MGA distribution landscape is competitive — and the MGAs winning on distribution aren't guessing.

Watch the full Honeycomb Insurance storyto see how Jon Repka and the team built their data-driven distribution engine — and what they'd tell other MGAs considering the same path.

Ready to explore what Ivans Marketing Insights could do for your distribution strategy?Let's talk.