Meeting with wholesalers in Las Vegas last week, Anheuser-Busch executives tried to stoke the intangibles that drive a sales team. The meeting with the company’s key middlemen was positive, said Dave Peacock, the company’s vice president of marketing. Dave, who will become president of Anheuser-Busch when Belgian brewer InBev takes over, talked to Lager Heads this afternoon.

We wanted to know: Were wholesalers worried about the transition? What questions did they ask?

“They hardly asked a question,” said Dave, whom we profiled a few weeks ago. At least in one of the sessions, “it was late and they knew there was (free) beer coming,” he explained.

So, apparently there is no panic in Anheuser-Busch’s sprawling network of distributors as Belgian brewer InBev prepares to buy the St. Louis-based brewer for $52 billion. Dave said he expected wholesalers — which distribute beer to bars, grocery stores and convenience stores — to be comfortable with the “familiar faces” in A-B’s sales and marketing department even after InBev takes control. That is expected to happen before Jan. 1.

“At the end of the day, the team is performing well,” he said. “I really don’t sense a big level of concern in our system right now. (Wholesalers) have a little bit of a wait-and-see attitude.”

One thing Lager Heads is watching is Anheuser-Busch’s early retirement program, which A-B hopes will trim hundreds of jobs. The deadline to sign up is Friday. The company is not sharing numbers, but Dave said that with a week to go, things were “moving along well.”

Things also seem to be moving along in Anheuser-Busch’s plan to motivate its top-performing wholesalers with public recognition. For whatever reason, the practice was somewhat downplayed at A-B in the 1990s, Dave said.

But now, the company is trying to create a “culture of accountability,” he said. (And yes, that does sound like it was ripped from an InBev management manual).

“Money and trips, the incentives and things are nice,” said Peacock. But for wholesalers, “nothing replaces peer recognition, marching up in front of 3,000 of your peers as one of the best.”

“We’re getting back to some of the basics,” said Dave. “If we’re going to push our guys to perform over the holidays, we have to be out there with them. “

Anheuser-Busch has some momentum. Its market share is up about 1.2 percent so far in the fourth quarter, according to the company.