Distributors are increasingly taking advantage of the power of technology to quickly pull relevant data to help them make better decisions.

Download a Free Chapter: The Little Black Book of Strategic Planning for Distributors Submit your email address below to receive a chapter of Brent Grover’s new book. When you submit your email you will be signed up to receive weekly distribution news updates.

But can too much data be a bad thing? After all, it can be easy to get caught up in the numbers and lose sight of your ultimate goal: business growth.

A recent article from Fast Company asks the same question, referencing a Princeton and Stanford study on the impact of having a perceived information gap on decision-making. As the article says, “there’s always one more report, one more analysis, and one more perspective that’s just a click or two away.”

The challenge, the author writes, is differentiating between questions worth exploring and questions best left unasked.

One solution may be to ensure you have the right person in place to find and deliver actionable data to those who need it. Tony Pericle talked about this in my interview with him earlier this year:

“Similar to how technology enables us to see what we were not able to see before, so it is with the right analyst,” he said. “Today people look at their business through a series of reports, balance statements, or a P&L statement, and it is extremely difficult to see the opportunities or pressure points from 50,000 feet. What they need is someone that can surgically dive into the business and be this X-ray tool … the analyst creates processes that will allow efficient and effective use of data. That’s important, because you can’t just throw reports out to somebody and say: ‘Figure it out.’ You have to make those reports actionable.”

Read the full interview with Pericle: Why Analytics is About People Not IT