Nearly 90% of distributors don’t believe their strategic plan can keep pace with change over the next three to five years. That’s a striking number, but a problem that can be addressed. Most of those businesses already have the data they need to plan better.

Distributors suffer from a chronic gap between data and the confidence to act on it. In a stable environment, data inaction is drag on performance. In a volatile one, lack of performance visibility becomes a serious vulnerability.

Distributors have always navigated disruption, but the nature of it has changed. It used to arrive in discrete episodes like a supply crunch or demand spike that would eventually resolve. What we’re seeing now is prolonged disruption.

The current effective tariff rate in the U.S. is at the highest level since 1943. Oil prices spiked nearly 75% following conflict in the Middle East. The Allianz Risk Barometer names cyber incidents as the top global business risk for the fifth year running, with artificial intelligence coming in second. And e-commerce continues to accelerate, reshaping customer expectations faster than many distribution businesses can adapt.

The businesses that struggle in these environments are the ones whose planning assumes conditions will eventually stabilize. Business leaders need to build a model that can factor in disruption, comprising plans A, B and C, so they can move on regardless of what happens next.

Distributors coming through a difficult period often discover in retrospect a lack of performance visibility, resulting in a gap between the plan and the live state of the business. Errors include purchasing decisions based on last quarter’s data, finance and operations working from different versions of performance truth; scenario plans that took weeks to model but were then out of date when delivered, and forecasts that weren’t updated frequently enough.

This is what contingency planning breakdown looks like in practice. Most distributors have some version of a plan. Far fewer have the visibility to know when conditions have shifted enough to trigger adjustments or the automated data feed to update individual branch plans to reflect the market conditions.

Those distributors that handle volatility well tend to share a few consistent traits.

The first is data trust. A recent Phocas survey of more than 100 global distributors found that just 31% report high trust in their data. That number matters because low data trust causes teams to work around their systems and default to random decisions when the pressure is on. In a volatile environment, that’s exactly when data is needed most.

The second trait is clear cross-team visibility. Nearly half of distributors report that inventory updates aren’t shared across sales, finance and operations. When those teams are working from different pictures of the business the response to any disruption becomes fragmented. Resilient businesses have a single, shared view of stock levels, sales projections and purchasing commitments.  The data needs to connect the people who need to act on it.

The third is proactive decisions. Rather than waiting for a crisis to be full swing before acting, the most resilient distributors define in advance the conditions that warrant a response, and what that response looks like. When demand signals shift or lead times extend, these are seen in the data before they become issues. The businesses that can spot them early have time to adjust.

Supplier collaboration sits alongside this. When purchasing decisions and demand forecasts are visible across the supply chain, lead-time predictions improve and joint planning becomes more effective.

The distributors who navigate the next five years well will be the ones whose teams trust what the numbers are telling them, then act on that information to quickly address the issue. That confidence is built long before the crisis hits. It comes from consistent data quality, from systems that give everyone the same picture, and from a planning process that’s connected to live results. Most distributors already have more of what they need than they realize. The work lies in closing the gap between the data that exists and the decisions it should be driving.

Myles Glashier is co-founder and chief executive officer of Phocas.