A Novel Approach for Commercial Opportunities Qualification Using the BANT Methodology under the Fuzzy Set Theory Framework

Resumo (EN)

Demand generation is crucial for organizations, supplying sales teams with well-qualified commercial opportunities. Despite the wide variety of existing opportunity qualification methodologies, the subjective nature of experts’ final evaluation remains an obstacle to efficiency and productivity in the business process. This research investigated how Fuzzy Set Theory and Fuzzy Logic could be applied to the BANT methodology for qualifying commercial opportunities, aiming to replace these deliberative evaluations by experts to increase the sales cycle performance. A fuzzy inference system was developed to emulate the assessments of the experts. The analysis of the ratings obtained after processing a sample of commercial opportunities from 2022 and 2023 confirmed the system’s effectiveness in aligning with expert perceptions. While the study indicated room for refinements in the model, the findings underscore the potential to streamline the qualification of opportunities and improve sales cycle performance.