Gives & Gets® is Hoffman’s framework for tracking exactly what you’re offering and what you’re getting back at every stage of a B2B negotiation, built on three psychological pillars: Leverage, Commitment, and Reciprocity. Get the exchange wrong and you land in the most expensive spot in sales: second place.
Because second place costs the same effort as losing outright. If six vendors are competing for a deal, there are only two spots worth occupying: first, or sixth. Everything in between means you worked as hard as the winner, and won nothing, because the rule of commitment made sure you couldn’t let go. Second place and sixth place get the exact same reward for their effort. Zip.
That is the trap most reps never see coming. A deal that is going nowhere still feels worth chasing, because walking away after weeks or months of work feels like admitting the work was wasted. It wasn’t wasted. It’s just over. Early elimination is free. Silver medals are expensive.
But there are three indicators inside Gives & Gets® that swing the deal in your favor.
“The most expensive deal in the world for a sales rep is the one threatening a silver medal. First place wins, and last place costs zero effort. But all others worked exhausting hours only to get the exact same reward as last place: Zip.”
[VIDEO EMBED PLACEHOLDER, need the YouTube link or video ID for this one]
Jeff Hoffman is a 3x Founder/CEO who has spent 35+ years selling and 25+ years training sales teams, 250,000+ professionals trained across 23 countries across 6 continents.
There’s no shortage of negotiation available. But after a career studying deals from both sides of the table, three pillars keep showing up in every healthy negotiation, and their absence is undeniable in every one that goes south. Those three pillars are what make Gives & Gets® work, not just a list of what to trade, but the psychology of why the trade lands.
Leverage, Commitment, and Reciprocity. I call them the three legs of a bar stool. None outranks the others, but missing even one leaves the stool worthless. You don’t have to win all three, or even own all three. You have to be aware of all three. Know where you stand on each leg and you’re most of the way to winning the deal.
Before any of that matters, though, two things have to be true or you’re not negotiating at all. You’re just working a deal.
Once both are in the room (both sides can say yes, and both sides see value in the same outcome,) then put your seat belt on. Time to make a deal, and time to start running your Gives & Gets®.
What is the “buyer’s sunburn” and why does it matter for leverage? Leverage, by definition, works like a physical lever. Through the exertion of force, a small object can move a much larger one, provided the lever is long enough. The question in a negotiation is always the same: where is that lever, and what needs to “be moved”?
Think of it like a sunburn. Picture patting a coworker on the shoulder the way you always do, except this time he winces and pulls away like you hurt him. You didn’t change anything about how you touched him. He just got sunburned at the beach over the weekend, and now the same amount of pressure that never bothered him before causes real pain. That hidden condition, not your hand, is what caused the reaction, and it’s also the force behind the lever. In a deal, leverage works the same way. Most people default to the status quo. An object at rest stays at rest, and most buyers are perfectly content staying where they are. It takes a strong enough sunburn, meaning real pain or a real pull toward pleasure, to supply enough force to move them off it.
That sunburn can come from either direction. On the buyer’s side, ask what’s changed in their world independent of this purchase: chasing a competitor, attracting talent, entering a new vertical, or avoiding pain like losing market share, a compliance deadline, or losing budget. On the seller’s side, leverage exists too, whether it’s quota pressure, the push to win a specific logo, or a competitive situation raising the stakes. Identify both sunburns, yours and theirs, and you’ve knocked out roughly a third of what it takes to master a negotiation. If you’ve got nothing but question marks when you ask where the leverage is, that’s the red flag, not a neutral unknown. It’s also the easiest of the three legs to find, because most people are already thinking about “why would they change” even if they never call it leverage.
How does Robert Cialdini’s Rule of Commitment apply to closing deals? Commitment and Reciprocity as negotiation levers both trace back to Dr. Robert Cialdini’s seminal work Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion, the book that first documented them as two of the core principles of persuasion. By definition, the more engaged a person is in a process, the more that person wants to see that process resolved. Note: it’s not the longer they’re engaged, but rather the “more.” Once a process stretches from a day into a week into a month, the option of doing nothing quietly fades away, because walking away after a month of work starts to feel like the month was wasted, even when it wasn’t. That feeling, not logic, is what pulls both sides toward closing.
This is also why buying a car takes half a day instead of fifteen minutes. The length of the process keeps you on the lot long enough that walking away without a car starts to feel like a wasted Saturday. In a negotiation, the more engaged either party is, the more likely that party wants the deal done, and it applies to buyers and sellers equally. It’s exactly why it’s so hard for a rep to walk away from a bad deal they’ve been chasing for months, discounting further on a deal they’d never have agreed to at the outset. Every request you make along the way, the demo, the introduction, the signed NDA, is a Get, and every Get you collect is more commitment banked in your favor.
By definition, when someone receives something of value, they feel the compulsion to return the favor. That compulsion is an intense one, but also a brief one. And the reason isn’t generosity. Most people find the feeling of owing someone something distasteful, because it shifts the balance of power. The compulsion works like a reflex, not a decision, closer to saying “God bless you” after a sneeze than to weighing a choice. It happens without will, and it’s over in an instant. That’s why the timing of the Get matters as much as the Give itself, which is the whole point of running a Gives & Gets® exchange instead of just handing things over.
Here’s the version that plays out on scheduling calls. A prospect agrees to a meeting time. The rep sends the calendar invite right there on the call and asks the prospect to confirm they see it. The moment the prospect hits accept, the rep immediately says something like, “If anything comes up, I want you to be able to reach me. My cell number is [number]. What’s yours?” Give the number, then ask for theirs, back to back, no delay, because that’s the entire window the compulsion is open. Run it that way and you will be shocked at its potency.
Add small talk between the give and the ask, and the success rate drops significantly because the window closed while the rep was still talking. That gap is the entire lesson: the Law of Reciprocity is real and powerful, but it only pays off if the Get lands inside the same breath as the Give.
Whichever side of the table you’re on, buying or selling, the exercise is the same before you walk into any negotiation. Take a breath and ask three questions. Where is the leverage, theirs and yours? Where does the commitment actually sit, based on what each side has done, not what either side has said? And what can you give right now, immediately, that opens a window to ask for something in return? Answer those three honestly and you’ve just run your own Gives & Gets®, and you’ll know exactly what has to happen next in the deal, and whether it’s worth fighting for a silver medal or better to walk.
(Candidate Q&As, none of this goes live without your sign-off, per your approval rule.)
What is Gives & Gets®? Tracking every concession you make against the physical activities made by the Prospect. A Give might be a demo, a proposal, or a discount. A Get is what you ask for in exchange: a signed NDA, an introduction to a decision maker, a cell phone number. Leverage, Commitment, and Reciprocity are the psychology underneath why that trade works.
What are the two mandatory rules to follow before any negotiation starts? You need someone who can say yes in the room, and both sides need to already agree there’s value in reaching a common destination. Without both, you’re working a deal, not negotiating one, and no amount of leverage, commitment, or reciprocity technique will change that until those two conditions are met.
Why should you require prospects to have skin in the game before you negotiate? Because talking isn’t engaging. Doing is. A buyer telling you about their org chart is not the same as sending it to you. Telling you a budget is not the same as sharing it. Telling you who the competition is isn’t the same as forwarding the competitor’s quote. The more a buyer actually does, versus simply says, the more the option of doing nothing fades away by the time a decision is due. Look for opportunities that require the other party to physically act: attending demos, signing an NDA, making introductions into power, producing documents on request. Every one of those actions raises the odds the deal closes, because it raises their engagement, not just the calendar time the deal has been open.
[OPEN ITEM: need 2 to 3 sellhoffman.com post URLs to link here + CIALDINI LINK]
Happy Selling!®, Jeff