This man badly needs the help of a marketing leader well versed in B2B demand generation, who can  create a program to fill sales funnels with warm leads. However, setting proper expectations is important, because warm leads don’t simply appear – it’s a lot of work and it takes considerable time. love salespeople.

SmartForms appends a survey’s worth of B2B data to leads at the moment of acquisition. The solution is now deployed with more than 100 B2B clients using marketing automation platforms like Marketo, Eloqua, Pardot, Hubspot, Act-On and CMS systems including WordPress, Drupal, Sitecore and many other web pages. Lead Scoring

Conversions to marketing qualified leads are 10% below where they were last quarter. If you have a good lead scoring model in place you are already scoring this interaction across channels — so you can use score as a proxy for interaction. If scoring models are different you will not be comparing like to like.

'With so many businesses struggling to create enough qualified sales leads, who’s the hero of our story? Your employer’s to blame, because they have not invested fully in a best-practices sales lead generation program. They have not purchased marketing automation like Marketo or Eloqua. We feel your pain. You are!

'Lead generation is at the top of almost every B2B marketer’s responsibility list. Generate more leads, generate better leads, and improve the rate to which lead opportunities turn into closed wins for the sales teams. Marketo is considered a leader in the lead management / marketing automation industry.

'by Jon Miller (@jonmiller) Marketo’s Definitive Guide to Lead Scoring defines lead scoring as a “shared sales and marketing methodology for ranking leads in order to determine their sales readiness.”. In other words, how attractive is this potential lead to me ? The ROI of Behavioral Lead Scoring.

Ten Fantastic Facts About The History of Internet Marketing was posted at Modern B2B Marketing - Marketo Best Practices Blog. | [link]. B2B Marketing Lead Scoring Modern B2B Marketing 'by Dayna Rothman As internet marketing grows at a rapid pace, it has accumulated quite a history. Tweet This]. Tweet This]. Tweet This].

would like to suggest to agencies and companies to “Staple Yourself to a Lead” to understand how a prospect engages with your company.  No Lead Left Behind. Any time a lead is transitioned from marketing to sales, you leave yourself open to losing leads in the hand-off. Staple yourself to a lead. 

The 2,800 of us attending last week’s Marketo Summit all came for various reasons and got the opportunity to attend different agenda tracks. The inside sales rep is key to ensuring proper lead handling and is the day-to-day grease to your alignment engine [Tweet This]. Sales says “those leads are junk”.

'by Dayna Rothman Lead management is the ability to capture, respond, and manage incoming leads. When spending so much time and money on creating the perfect campaign, you want to make sure you have numerous best practices in place to manage your leads throughout the entire lifecycle. Score leads using implicit behavioral data.

At the forefront are lead generation, lead nurturing, and building a brand that distinguishes the organization from the competition. Optify B2B Lead Generation Report. Aberdeen Group: Lead Scoring Prioritization. Aberdeen’s guide to lead scoring is a few years old but still relevant and frequently referenced.

The company helps businesses generate and manage leads better through marketing automation processes and technologies. We all know “that guy” – the marketer who hangs his hat on lead generation alone. We’ll call this marketer Lead Rex. Rex’s method of throwing leads over the wall may have been passable in the good ol’ days.

Companies like Eloqua, Pardot, Marketo, and Hubspot do a remarkable job with online lead scoring. They have defined the marketing automation and lead scoring space. But what about lead scoring for calls? How does online lead scoring work? How does phone lead scoring work?

90+%  of your B2B marketer colleagues will tell you they are yet to generate leads from social media pages. What if you could generate leads directly off your Company’s Facebook page? Here are a few key ways on how to accelerate your demand using rich media: Boost Top-of-Funnel Leads. Email response rates continue to drop today.

Lead scoring is a process for ranking leads based on sales readiness or on interest level. All leads are NOT created equal. Some leads are ready to buy right now, others will require effort and time—sometimes substantial—before they are ready to make a purchasing decision. How do you score phone leads?

If the people, processes, resources, human intervention, common sense (think about lead scoring, for instance) and organizational and cultural ‘musts’ aren’t there, marketing automation simply fails. True, content marketing is important and even underestimated in lead generation but it’s not just about that. The reason?

by Dayna Rothman Today’s guest post is from Sam Boush, President of Lead Lizard. He is an expert in marketing automation and lead management best practices. Best Practice #1: You Can’t Automation A Process That Doesn’t Exist—Always Map Your Lead Flow. Tehra Peace, Content Director, Lead Lizard. What’s the alternative?

'Buffer Need to craft a best-practices sales lead generation program? ” Those definitive guides from Marketo are terrific content, but Find New Customers has our own “definitive guide.” This great white paper is a superb guide to help companies like your create best practices sales lead generation programs.

Marketers are beginning to realize that the quality of content is crucial to success in both lead generation and lead nurturing. also think lead intelligence will improve as content consumption becomes a more effective indicator of buy cycle stage and lead score. Marketing is no longer a one-way conversation.

'Buffer On February 13, 2009, the sales lead generation company Find New Customers was born. We also have a lot of great content on BtoB marketing, lead nurturing, lead scoring, and more on sales lead generation  - all of which can be found at www.findnewcustomers.com. Who should talk to Find New Customers?

Ran is the VP of marketing for Leadspace , a pioneer in social lead targeting. An increasing number of CMOs view lead scoring, the process of ranking leads based on their sales-readiness , as a key component in their B2B marketing strategy. Lead Scoring Modern B2B MarketingAnd for a good reason.

Give Sales a few high quality leads – then they sell them all and everyone is happy. Every company needs to invest in digital marketing and build an awesome B2B demand generation program that delivers those high quality sales leads. Gentle, ongoing lead nurturing to earn trust. Digital Marketing). ?  Peter F. Drucker.

One of the keys to creating this synergy is the effective use of a Sales Development Team (you may call this inside sales, lead qualification, or even business development). Here are some common questions about the Sales Development process that your organization will want to answer: When should Marketing pass a lead to the SDRs?

To help adjust to this demographic shift, Algonquin College hired OnPath Business Solutions to deploy Salesforce with Marketo to revamp its student recruitment process. Within the first year of rollout, Algonquin College increased lead generation by 23% and reduced collateral fulfillment time by >50%.

Rockefeller were a marketer today, there is no doubt that he would be finding success using marketing automation for lead scoring, lead management, lead nurturing, and so much more.  In marketing, many of us spend too much time wildcatting for leads.  by Kelly Waffle When people hear the name, John D.

by Dayna Rothman Relevance is the key to creating content for demand generation that impacts lead generation , lead nurturing and lead scoring. Instead, you must create multiple pieces of content relevant to buyer roles and buyer stages, enticing a lead to engage with your content multiple times during the buying cycle.

by Jon Miller Inbound marketing is: The process of helping potential customers find your company – often before they are even looking to make a purchase – and then turning that early awareness into brand preference and, ultimately, into leads. They do this by creating relevant and compelling content to attract and convert leads.

As you become familiar with the platform you’re probably doing some targeting, you’re using email effectively as a channel, and the quality of the leads you’re sending to sales is much better than before. Marketo just released some great new client services capabilities to help you succeed with marketing automation.

Salesforce recently rebranded their social marketing application as the Marketing Cloud, and their website says you can use their solutions to “optimize campaigns from lead to close, on every channel”. Similarly, Note: Although he was an independent consultant when he wrote that post, Jep is now the Director of Expert Services at Marketo.).

by Stephanie Yung Every lead a Marketo Sales Development Representative calls into goes through an initial prospecting process, called “the sniff test”. This process happens before an initial call and helps our Sales Development Representatives prepare for a relevant conversation with a lead. What is your lead interested in?

With marketing automation , you have access to powerful features like multi-step campaigns, lead scoring, and analytics, which will make your email tactics much more strategic. Instead, you can focus on creating multi-stage, automated campaigns to nurture your leads while you get other work done. Feature Comparison.

You are trying to make sure your lead generation vehicles are driven efficiently and effectively—with marketing automation as your engine—to beat your competitors to the finish line.  Yet, that is what many marketers do with their marketing automation and lead management vehicles.  B2B Marketing Lead Scoring b2b marketing

It only recently added standard B2B marketing automation features including a customer-level marketing database, outbound email, landing pages, lead scoring, Web behavior tracking, reporting, and Salesforce.com integration. B2B marketing automation systems are built for lead nurturing and provide a foundation adequate for that purpose.

by Phil Fernandez Well, it’s been a busy couple of weeks for us here at Marketo!  I’ve (almost) recovered after a massive Marketo presence at Dreamforce with our friends at salesforce.com.  One of the headlines from Dreamforce was obviously salesforce.com’s launch of their Marketing Cloud. Check it out.

originally saw SetLogik as a tool to associate marketing leads with sales opportunities, even when they are not connected directly within Salesforce.com. This has been sadly lacking in most B2B marketing automation systems, which supplement the Salesforce.com database with barely-extensible lead profiles and contact histories.

Waffle , Director of Account Development, Marketo, Inc. He serves as a thought leader and evangelist for Marketo sharing insight through blogs, articles and speaking engagements. I’ve been in companies where the sales reps believe all the leads that the marketers give them are garbage.  Guest Post written by: Kelly J.

Active across social networks, Cindy leads Microsoft’s small- to midsized-business sales and marketing efforts as Vice President U.S. Liz also writes the Lead With Intuition blog. Another New Yorker, Beth leads GE’s growth efforts including sales, marketing and communications and innovation platforms. Stacey Acevero.

Active across social networks, Cindy leads Microsoft’s small- to midsized-business sales and marketing efforts as Vice President U.S. Liz also writes the Lead With Intuition blog. Another New Yorker, Beth leads GE’s growth efforts including sales, marketing and communications and innovation platforms. Stacey Acevero.

The company helps businesses generate and manage leads better through marketing automation processes and technologies. If you can use social as a way to improve lead scoring, pounce on the opportunity. was posted at Modern B2B Marketing - Marketo Best Practices Blog. | [link]. He can be reached at jgray@leadmd.com.

Our scoring reflects their need for special features for automated content selection, project management, complex lead scores, and tight control over the rights granted to individual users. Marketo and Oracle (specifically, Oracle CRM On Demand Marketing ) are considerably further back in the leader quadrant.

He is author of  The Like Economy,  the forthcoming  LinkedIn for Business: How Advertisers, Marketers and Salespeople Get Leads, Sales and Profits,  and co-author of  Facebook Marketing. Recently, Marketo : In a recent session you talked about obstacles and misconceptions that are blocking your Facebook results?

The sales lead generation firm Find New Customers is finally changing marketing automation vendors. However, time had come for the sales lead generation firm Find New Customers to move on. As much as we love these firms, software from great companies like Marketo and Eloqua are not affordable for us.). But no more. So we moved.

Marketing Automation : the typical step-up from email marketing, marketing automation software (such as Marketo , Eloqua , Act-On , Pardot , and others ) allows you to automate the sending of your emails and, more importantly, of nurturing your leads. What are College Students to Do? The Modern Marketer. Good luck!

Marketing automation combines technology, typically hosted, with business processes that score leads based on fixed criteria like title and size of company, as well as dynamic criteria, such as which web pages the person viewed, whether the individual attended a webinar or clicked through to an offer. Marketing automation, what is it?

According to sources ranging from Hubspot to MECLabs only between 2% and 6% of inbound web leads are ready to buy immediately. That means that if your sales team calls all of those leads, they are wasting at least 94% of their time. Instead of receiving an immediate phone call, those leads need to be nurtured, hugged and loved.

The vast majority of marketing departments are finding success with lead generation (Good!) Most marketing teams are running a variety of great demand generation programs , generating lots of leads that unfortunately aren’t closing. The main reason is that the leads are either passed too early or too late. It’s a paradox.

Which leads to another question: do certain types of campaigns even need an offer in the first place? Take lead nurturing : is it strictly essential that every lead nurturing touch include a specific, gated, call to action? have my concerns, however, about extending it to lead nurturing and the email medium. Occasionally?

I wrote last week about the difficulty of linking marketing leads to sales results. One reason the topic was on my mind is I’m also thinking a lot these days about lead scoring. But the ultimate goal is to identify the leads most likely to generate revenue. In this context, scoring can be used in three ways.

by Maria Pergolino Recently, Marketo hosted over 1200 people at our annual user conference, bringing customers, employees, industry luminaries, and prospects from all over the world together. More importantly, marketing automation can be used to score these partners, allowing you to know which are most engaged or successful.

Before you jump into it head first and spend countless hours setting up all the landing pages, workflows, and start messing with scoring models it’s best to take a step back and make sure you and all your team are in sync. How and in which stage will marketing hand leads off to sales? Step 5: Scoring Model. Now what?

Rajesh is a Marketo expert and has hands-on experience defining projects and implementing them at both venture-backed start-ups and consulting firms. The value of social media as part of the B2B marketing mix includes branding, messaging, lead generation, and customer interaction. We are very excited to welcome him. Conversion rate.

We’ve been helping them with sales lead generation , including  content marketing , lead nurturing , lead scoring and marketing strategy – especially since they are a Marketo client. To have a good marketing department to create sales lead generation programs, you need both. Content Creators.

by Rajiv Kapoor Lead lifecycle refers to how we manage the life of a lead (or contact or prospect depending on your terminology) from the moment it shows up in the system to deal close. The lead lifecycle defines where a lead can live, how a lead moves along, and what we do with a lead at each stage.

No lead scoring. But, this firm does have a state of the art marketing automation software, Marketo. It’s certainly not Marketo’s fault, but the bottom line is this: “Buying software does not make you smarter, better looking or a better marketer.” Happy Cinco De Mayo from Find New Customers !

Read Part 1: Lead Generation and Nurture and Part 2: Content, Content, Content.). Historically, the relationship between marketing and sales has been (to put it politely) problematic, with lots of finger-pointing, and lots of valuable sales leads falling through the gaps between the two functions. Score Your Leads Collaboratively.

by Seth Resler Recently, Marketo launched an in-depth survey of B2B companies to see how well they are maximizing the return on their marketing dollars. Simple: Top performers maximize revenue by ensuring that only the most qualified sales leads are passed from the Marketing department to the Sales department. Why is this?

leading author, speaker, strategist, and founder of the Content Marketing Institute, Joe helps businesses understand the trends in content marketing, and how marketers can learn to think and act like publishers. Where are you going to be the leading expert in the world, and how is that going to help you drive your business?

Finding new leads, leads that haven’t yet found you, and preparing them for sales is tough work. good lead generation team keeps your sales team fed and focused on closing deals. The lead generation team members develop unique skills and learn how to carefully track leads to pass only the best to sales.

We’re delighted to announce the newest client of the lead generation company and global marketing firm Find New Customers – Protegrity. Please also note that they are a Marketo client. Marketing buyer personas content marketing Find New Customers lead-generation lead-nurturing lead-scoring

This week we focus on lead generation and lead nurturing, next week we’ll look at getting the most from content marketing, and finally we’ll concentrate on how to improve your sales and marketing alignment. Lead Generation and Lead Nurturing. In a downturn, you can’t afford to let a single lead go to waste.

If you have been struggling to manage leads because manual processes are in your way, MA might be a good solution for you. MA provides insight into buyer behavior, activities to support that behavior and workflow-type rules for lead scoring. Then the leads will start rolling in. Be stingy with your leads. Right?

Last week, Jeff Ogden , President of Find New Customers spent a full day with a client of Marketo. This company was kind enough to demonstrate what they had set up in Marketo – for nurturing, lead scoring, etc. The scoring approach was weak. I was not impressed. had an epiphany right there. beg to differ.

Marketing automation provided the lead scoring and lead routing to help us manage our lead process much better.  Lead scoring is still a key reason why many marketers look at marketing automation today. Lead nurturing also raises win rates on marketing-generated leads by an average of seven percent. 

It’s very clear that marketers can now generate, score and nurture leads to a level that was not possible just a few years ago. Lead scoring and nurturing tools ensure that a company can manage the top of the funnel through to marketing qualified leads (MQL). Ready to get started?

by Seth Resler Have you implemented a formal lead scoring and qualification process? So here it is, sans sugar coating: Please stop sending us crap leads. But the truth is, the world’s changed, and it’s not as hard to deliver qualified leads to the sales team. Dear Marketing Department, Please Stop Sending Us Crap Leads.

In the early stages of a recent client engagement, it became apparent that the schema already in place to determine and assign lead scores was, well: broken. The basic lead scoring recipe is typically a variation on the following: * assign positive scores for desired behavior or demographics (e.g. and so on.

Because of the limitations of inbound marketing, a complete B2B marketing strategy needs to incorporate a full portfolio of lead-generation approaches, including events, webinars, email, and advertising as well as inbound tactics. Don’t settle for basic “one-size fits-all” lead nurturing. Ensure no lead gets left behind.

We asked Marketo employees to caption the photo below by completing the phrase “You Know You’re in Marketing When…” with a funny Valentine theme. The …You wait until your girlfriend’s lead score is above qualified threshold before you decide to propose. …You Refer to a Blind Date as “Anonymous Lead”.

Are the SLAs associated with lead handoffs being adhered to? services consultant can look at your lead generation, lead management, lead scoring, and lead nurturing processes and show you where you can fine-tune your systems based on best practices. Along the way it can get frustrating.

The value of a lead is relative. Most marketing departments would be more comfortable handing off a lead from sballmer@microsoft.com than one from anonymous@gmail.com. Yet, from an online marketing perspective, these leads often look the same. Unfortunately, leads are fairly useless without an eventual sale. Spend. Spend.

With our latest Facebook campaign, we are doing just that; tying leads generated by Facebook directly into our revenue pipeline via Marketo. We developed a custom Facebook application that generates a special offer and is powered by a Marketo form. From there the names are added directly into a lead nurture campaign.

This white paper, sponsored by Marketo, is several years old. ” We wish to thank our sponsor, Marketo , as well as the Editor of this, Jill Konrath , for making this such a great white paper. Please note that, despite the fact that it is free and Marketo sponsored it, we no longer provide data to Marketo.).

Are we generating engaged prospects that convert to qualified leads?  Prospects that participated in many of the activities received a higher lead score and ranked higher on our index.  View more presentations from Marketo. by Jason Miller I’m pleased to welcome Heidi Bullock, Sr. critical step.

As a result, B2B marketers sometimes overlook the professional social media site’s ability to support lead generation and qualification. To help you use this information about when LinkedIn users engage to maximize your lead generation and qualification activities, examine eight common types of content listed below. were male. Links.

With funds raised by Marketo, Hubspot, and Act-On Software, this industry is red-hot in 2012.  Keep in mind that most companies need the help of companies like AcquireB2B , PointClear or Find New Customers to help with challenging issues such as buyer personas, lead nurturing, lead scoring and content marketing. __.

by Jason Miller With 2011 now in the history books I thought it would be interesting to collect Marketo’s most popular blog posts from the past year and revisit them as a Greatest Hits collection. Instead I present to you the most popular Marketo blog posts from 2011 based on views and shares. How Does Lead Response Time Impact Sales?

by Liz Smyth Imagine being able to automate the routine and repeatable tasks associated with lead nurturing , lead scoring and lead management. was posted at Modern B2B Marketing - Marketo Best Practices Blog. | [link]. Marketing Automation Lead Nurturing Lead ScoringWell, that’s the reality!

For example, LoopFuse found that nearly twice as many used email and web landing pages as lead scoring. It's applied by Marketo , Pardot , Act-On Software , Genius , Net-Results , and many others. Act-On Software recently reported that 40% of marketers are dissatisfied with their campaign management program. ease of use.

Lead scoring is a process for ranking leads based on sales readiness or on interest level. All leads are NOT created equal. Some leads are ready to buy right now, others will require effort and time—sometimes substantial—before they are ready to make a purchasing decision. How Lead Scoring Works.

In order to drive sales leads for your business, you need to turn your website into Grand Central Station. In order to drive sales leads for your sales teams, you need to think of your website as Grand Central Station. Actually, they will use your Call to Action and sign up – leading to gentle, ongoing lead nurturing.)

Lead Scoring: Social listening platforms can score potential sales leads based on the social activity of a certain customer. Marketing Automation in a Social World: Take Some of the Work Out of Online Socializing was posted at Modern B2B Marketing - Marketo Best Practices Blog. | [link].

They all claim to have the magic formula for optimizing leads, lead scoring and sales. As the equation demonstrates, having a search engine optimized website while utilizing content is a better strategy when it comes to lead generation. B2B Marketing b2b marketing content marketing Lead Scoring Social Media

With a no lead is left behind attitude going in, here are 5 ways to get started with Closed Loop Marketing: Data Management: Effective data management is critical for any Marketing Organization. Effective data collection and maintenance is also essential to ensuring database integrity for customers and leads.

by Maria Pergolino Lead Scoring isn’t hard, but it does need regular tweaks. We have been adjusting ours every quarter or so for over three years, so I thought I would share some of our less obvious but super important scoring attributes. Here are some of the demographics we score that you might not normally consider: Bad data.

My last two posts (not counting this morning’s detour into Marketo-land) described common errors marketers make when selecting marketing automation systems. This would include segmentation rules, content creation, processing logic, CRM integration, lead scoring, and any other tasks required to run the program.

by Rajiv Kapoor Once you set-up lead scoring, how do you ensure that it’s working correctly? One of the big benefits of lead scoring is the ability to identify the best Marketing Qualified Leads (MQL) based on lead score. Run a report of all high scoring leads. Inside Sales Team).

They’ve filled the funnel with sales leads.  The sales department followed through on the leads provided but somehow your close-ratios are dropping.  If you are finding issues in your lead generation process, check these 5 reasons why you may be losing opportunities and what you can do to fix it: 1. B2B Sales sales leads

Here are 5 ways that marketing automation technology is transforming our B2B marketing world: Lead nurturing : As many as 80% of your prospects could buy from you someday but aren’t ready to buy from you today. Leads that are nurtured are more likely to buy more, and have shorter sales cycles, so you generate more revenue faster.

It’s not about generating more leads; it’s about identifying the right leads. target market definitions, lead handoff criteria, service-level agreements), lead generators have little choice but to flood the funnel with any prospect who shows the slightest interest. Marketing Automation with no/weak processes.

The classic problem between marketing and sales: Marketing says Sales does not follow up on leads. Sales says Marketing’s leads suck. Marketing gives sales lousy leads and sales declines to follow up. Now let’s examine another key principle learned by readers of How to Find New Customers —   lead scoring.

joined a UK technology start-up as Marketing Manager in 2009 and was immediately tasked with increasing the number of high quality leads to our sales team by 500%. Opsview’s new VP Sales wanted to drive inbound leads whilst ensuring that his team only worked on warm, inbound prospects. Lead Scoring in LoopFuse.

Effective Ways to Evaluate and Generate Sales Leads. In this 2nd episode, Gerhard inquires about the importance of lead scoring. Here Bill provides examples on why it’s important to discover what lead scoring model fits your business. B2B Sales Lead Scoring

Despite the claims of search engine optimization folks, visitors to your website are NOT qualified sales leads. Look at this image of a revenue cycle (compliments of Marketo ). But it also means Lead Nurturing, Lead Scoring and Content Marketing , as well as Sales Ennoblement and so forth. lead generation

Henry, who is the VP of Global Field and Industry Marketing, opened with an explanation of why QlikView needed marketing automation and why they chose Marketo.  way to leverage global marketing campaigns and a faster, easier way to create and change landing pages and capture leads. Target profiling and lead scoring.

Over 2000 marketers are attending the Marketo ‘Revenue Rockstar’ Tour and will rock their way to marketing stardom. Join OnPath Business Solutions (Authorized Business Partner) and Marketo in Toronto and learn revenue-focused strategies and tactics designed to crank up top-line at your organization. Who should attend?

B2B Lead Generation | Ensuring You Make Your Number in 2012. Is our lead management optimized? Buyer personas, Content marketing , SEO, lead nurturing , lead scoring, metrics, sales enablement.). Formalizing your lead generation progression. The investments you make today pay dividends next year.

B2B Lead Generation | How to Find New Customers. We only share your contact info with the sponsor, Marketo.). Jeff Ogden ( @fearlesscomp ) is President of the B2B lead generation consultancy, Find New Customers. Over 9 out 10 companies (95%) raised sales quotas in 2011. They will undoubtedly go up again in 2012.

by Maria Pergolino Data from Google Insights for Search suggests lead generation is starting to slide off the radar of marketers. The truth is that marketers are becoming more focused on more specific topics like demand generation, lead scoring and lead nurturing. Or is it?

B2B Lead Generation | Buying stuff is easy – fixing problems is hard. SaaS marketing automation products like Marketo , Hubspot , Eloqua and the like are very, very easy to buy. Too many companies believe purchasing software fixes B2B lead generation. Fixing your B2B lead generation challenges is a lot like losing weight.

B2B Lead Generation : Is a White Paper just great content or a great lead generation tool. In this post, we explain how to turn that great new white paper you just published into a superb lead generation tool — using the best-practice approach of one of our favorite companies, Kinaxis. What’s the difference?