“I don’t know where to start.”

That’s a refrain I hear often, when it comes to putting data to work for your wine business. I get it. Data can be overwhelming, particularly if you spend most of your time making wine or growing grapes or selling wine or communicating about wine in one form or another (as I do).

Here’s the good news: You don’t have to know everything there is to know. In fact, the best approach is probably to take small steps, one at a time, according to what your gut is telling you needs the most attention right now.

Here are five specific scenarios we’ve heard recently, along with practical applications for putting the data to use.

1. Our national sales meeting is coming up. How can outside data tell my team something they don’t already know, so they can make more sales?

2. We’re a member-based organization that needs to give the same attention to small producers as we do to large ones. Can the same system of data analysis expand and contract, to accommodate production?

3. Our wine club over-indexes on older consumers, and we’re anxious about them buying less or dropping out altogether. How can we carve up the data, in order to customize offerings that will appeal to their current tastes and keep them interested?

4. We’re a young, emerging region and we need to make smart decisions right away about what grapes to plant and where. What kind of data can help us with this?

5. If you were to suggest the five best “data things” I can do for my business, what would they be? We don’t have a big budget or a lot of staff, so they need to be efficient and actionable.

Which of these scenarios sounds familiar to you? Please let us know, because they’re all questions we’ve fielded in recent months, and we think we’d be able to help you too.

Thank you, as always, for your attention and for reading these posts.