When I joined Los Angeles Football Club in the early formation stages, we had no stadium, no playing history, and no fan base. What we had was a vision — and the job was to sell it years before it would become real.
Most sales conversations start with something tangible: a product that exists, a track record you can point to, a building a prospect can walk through. What I learned at LAFC — and then again at SoFi Stadium with the Chargers — is that the most interesting and demanding sales work happens long before any of that exists. When you're selling a vision, you're not selling what something is. You're selling what it will mean.
Why Selling a Vision Is Harder Than Selling a Product
Selling premium inventory before a venue opens requires a completely different approach than traditional sales. The product isn't tangible. There's no suite to walk through, no game-day atmosphere to reference, no comparable to point at and say "you'll be part of something like this." Every objection the prospect has is a reasonable one, because they're being asked to commit real money to something that doesn't yet exist.
What makes the difference is the quality of the story you're able to tell — and how specifically it connects to what the prospect actually cares about. Corporate partners need to understand the brand positioning and what alignment with this new club says about them. High-net-worth individuals need to feel the exclusivity and lifetime opportunity. Both groups need to believe that the people asking them to commit early have thought carefully about what it means to be a founding partner.
What Works: Lead With the Irreversible
One of the most effective tools in pre-open sales is scarcity that can't be manufactured later. Founding partner status. Charter memberships. Naming rights on specific premium spaces. These are things that can only be sold once — and the right prospect understands intuitively that being early has lasting value. The conversation shifts from "why should I buy this now" to "can I afford not to be part of this at the founding level."
At LAFC, we were methodical about how founding partner inventory was structured and who we approached. We weren't trying to close everyone — we were trying to identify the right partners who would grow with the club and whose association would signal something meaningful to the market. That selectivity itself became part of the story.
Building Trust When There's Nothing to Show
In the absence of a physical product, trust is built through the quality of the people and the precision of the process. Prospects are evaluating you as much as they're evaluating the opportunity. Do you know what you're building? Have you thought through the long-term value proposition? Do you have answers when the hard questions come?
The most effective pre-open sales teams I've been part of were obsessive about preparation — about understanding each prospect's business deeply enough to have a specific conversation about what a partnership would unlock for them. That specificity, more than anything else, separated the conversations that led to closed deals from the ones that stalled out at the due diligence phase. More of Michael's thinking on partnership development can be found on his LinkedIn profile.
Conclusion
The principles that made pre-open sales work at LAFC and SoFi Stadium aren't unique to sports. Any time you're building something new — a company, a product, a venture — you're selling a vision before the venue exists. The playbook is the same: lead with irreversible scarcity, build trust through specificity, and understand that you're not closing a transaction — you're inviting someone to be part of a founding story. The clients who say yes early are rarely the ones you had to convince hardest. They're the ones who recognized the opportunity before it was obvious.