Pam Didner: Hello everyone. Welcome to another episode of B2B Marketing and More with Pam Didner. Yay. I haven't done a lot of episodes lately. That's because I was busy, I don't know, writing a novel! Yes, I'm writing a novel. I will tell you more little later in a different episode, but today I have a special guest for you and she is a Director of Demand Generation for HMI Performance Incentive. And she is Agnes Fotino O'Connell. Hey Agnes, so happy to have you here.   Agnes Fotino O’Connell: Pam, I'm so excited to be here. Thanks for having me.   Pam Didner: Yes, and we met at the B2B MX in February. Agnes came to my workshop and we had a great time. We hit it off right there, and at that time I was talking about sales enablement, and Agnes told me specifically that that's something that she has been doing and also is doing it. So that's why I invited Agnes to the podcast to talk about specifically couple things, how to better support sales and also better supporting sales through demand gen. Before we get started, Agnes, talk to us about your job and also what does your company do?   Agnes Fotino O’Connell: Yeah, sure. HMI Performance Incentives is a leading incentive strategy company, helping companies with a broad spectrum of needs and challenges, motivate both their direct and indirect sales teams, customers, et cetera, to meet sales goals, increase loyalty, change behaviors, and everything else that you come to know and love about customer loyalty and incentive strategies.   Pam Didner: If I'm not mistaken, I think the incentive program that you set up is very much tailored for channel partners, such as the wholesalers working directly with their distributors and the dealers and the value-added resellers, assisting integrators. It’s basically kind of like a channel marketing tools and then that you use that to incentivize and a lot of channel partners to reach the sales goal. Can you give us a very specific example about that?     Agnes Fotino O’Connell: Yeah, sure. We might work with a large wholesaler. Let's say they were in the building material space. They're a company that's trying to go after the contractor or the dealer, and we'd help them do a couple things.  One, we'd help them create a customer loyalty program that might go after what we call the “middle 60” of customers, that group that is always with you, you know what to expect out of them. And then might also help target their top 20% of their customers--the customers that bring 80% of their business, typically. And we might put together some form of group incentive travel trip for those top customers, helping build a moat about around them, helping them diffuse from competition taking them, and again, help grow that middle 60 to do more than they've historically done with them.   Pam Didner: So it is whatever your customer want to incentivize and you build a program and you are able to track the performance and then be able to, uh, award whoever reached that specific target.   Agnes Fotino O’Connell You're spot on, Pam, for an incentive marketing agency.   Pam Didner: Very, very good. So then talk to us now, you have told us specifically in terms of what your company has done. Your role is a Director of demand gen, and I remember when I was talking to you and you said you've been on the sales side, you've been on the marketing side. Before I talked to you about demand gen, can you talk to us a little bit about being on the sales side, being on the marketing side for any B2B marketers would like to supporting sales?  Do you have any specific tips, trick, or advice?   Agnes Fotino O’Connell: I think you have to just really understand what's important to the sales folks at a myriad of levels. Right. And Pam, I actually think you gave some really amazing advice during your workshop at the B2B MX on. About, you know, finding your sales advocates, right? Finding those folks who are gonna help you make an imp