Cynthia Handal

Cynthia HandalSep 11, 2026

I once told a client I loved working with their #1 competitor. In writing. In a proposal I sent THEM. Before B2B sales, I did leasing sales at a real estate company. We had ONE email. ONE presentation. For every single prospect. Just swap the logo and pray. 🙏 One day we sent Cinepolis a beautifully "personalized" proposal... ...raving about how much we loved working with Cinemark. Their direct competitor. Cinepolis went silent for weeks. Turns out they were too busy forwarding our email around the office like "you guys need to see this." We didn't lose that deal on price. We lost it because we told a company, in writing, they were interchangeable with the brand they compete with every single day. If I run proposals for my own sales team, I would never let that happen again. This is why Qwilr exists. Their new AI-powered Smart Proposal Engine makes it ridiculously easy to create highly personalized proposals, without needing to waste hours tailoring the content. Plus, it shows you when someone opens a proposal, what they actually read, if they forward it internally. So you know if you're closing a deal or becoming someone's group chat story. Don't be Cynthia of 2016.

Cynthia HandalSep 18, 2026

The rep most afraid of cold calling on my team booked one of our biggest meetings of the quarter. 9 months ago, she was terrified to go off script. She wrote out every word. Her voice would shake. She’d apologize for talking too fast. I didn’t tell her to be more confident. I told her to get curious. Stop treating the call like a performance. Ask a real question. Listen to the answer. Freestyle, as long as you hit 5 things: identify the problem, the gap, current situation, desired situation, and finally, the urgency of why now? Three months later, she booked a CEO who had ignored four reps before her. Why? She was the first one who actually listened instead of rushing into the pitch.

Cynthia HandalSep 17, 2026

Every sales leader agrees on one thing, even if nobody says it out loud: their reps are bad at using the CRM. Not because they're lazy. Updating five fields after every call was never part of the job. So pipeline review becomes a guessing game. You assume the data is roughly right, because checking 40+ open deals one by one isn't realistic. Here's what that guessing actually costs you: deals sitting in the wrong stage for weeks. Close dates that haven't moved since the day they were entered. One rep at 90% pipeline hygiene, another at 40%, and no way to tell which is which until you ask each of them directly. I plugged in an agent that flags all of it automatically, per rep and across the whole team: who's up to date, who isn't, which deals are stale, which ones are sized or staged wrong. It's not about saving time. It's that for the first time, I actually know the true state of my pipeline, not what the dashboard tells me to believe.