Jake, This is a wonderful exercise in exploring the variables in marketing. Your review was a top down. You start with the advertisement/sponsorship itself, look at its audience and drill all the way down to your prospect base. You run the numbers and you see a lot of waste and... You are right. Flip your study and go bottom up. Start with projected profit per sale (over the life of your avg contract), put a number on the size of your prospect base (25k dealers?), estimate how many of your unsold prospect base are UFC followers (example: if 3% then = 750 dealers) and NOW you've got an idea on how to "work" the UFC sponsorship. If you can identify 750 rabid UFC fans in your audience, what would that be worth to you? UFC has a big Vegas connection and has a tour. How hard would it be to exploit? Can you get 75 dealers from this group to give your product a good hard look for 2009? I'd say so. ROI time. Lastly, what's your break even? How many NEW dealers are needed to reach break even? We'll never know, but, we do know that subscriber based software gets exponentially more profitable the higher your counts get.
thnx for the fun!
Joe <---marketing is my middle name