“We attend a lot of trade shows each year, and the contacts we collect are our most valuable commercial asset. Linkly captures, integrates, and qualifies, from business card to CRM to follow-up.”

Context

40Factory is an Italian company specialising in Industrial IoT and AI solutions for manufacturing. It has developed MAT (a scalable IIoT platform for analysing machine and line data), Wilson.ai (conversational virtual assistants and AI agents), and Sentra (AI video intelligence applied to industrial processes): technologies that let machine builders (OEMs) deliver value-added services and let end users optimise their production processes.

It also supports OEMs with strategic consulting on the transition to servitization, helping them move from a business based on selling machines to one based also on delivering services.

Industry B2B trade shows and events are one of the prospecting channels 40Factory uses.

The real problem

The post-show period was one of the most time-consuming activities in the commercial funnel. The company’s classic pattern:

• Business cards collected or photographed, then transcribed by hand into Excel
• Manual CRM entry postponed to the week after returning, with multiple data sources to merge
• Follow-ups delayed by a few days
• Incomplete qualification data: time at the show isn’t always enough to write down every note
• Manual event reporting: hours in Excel to produce summary figures (how many leads, from which sectors, with what intent)

The result: several hours of manual work to collect, enter, and report information and notes, from the show floor all the way to the CRM.

What we built

40Factory adopted Linkly, a solution developed by the Soraia team that orchestrates 5 AI agents covering the full pre-show, during, and post-show cycle:

1. Capture Agent, OCR on business cards, trade show badges, and QR codes. Stand staff take a photo; the agent reads and structures the data.
2. Enrichment Agent, cross-references 30+ data sources (LinkedIn, company registries, public sources) to enrich each contact with a verified email, role, phone number, and company information.
3. Qualification Agent, proposes a qualification form generated dynamically on 40Factory’s criteria (sector, company size, product fit for MAT/Wilson/Sentra, urgency).
4. Activation Agent, pushes the enriched, qualified contact directly into 40Factory’s commercial CRM, ready for the sales team.
5. Analytics Agent, produces the executive report at event close: leads by sector, cost per lead, estimated pipeline, conversion rate by day and by stand, and a demographic breakdown of attendees who visited the stand.

On top of the 5 agents, a dedicated Linkly consultant manages setup and individual events to ensure data quality and adaptation to the specific dynamics of each show.

Why 40Factory chose Linkly

Three criteria drove the decision:

• All-inclusive fixed annual fee: unlimited scans, enriched contacts, AI agents, dedicated consultant. No per-event pricing surprises.
• Automation of a process: from scanning the business card to the enriched contact in the CRM, with no manual steps in between. No more transcribing by hand.
• CRM integration (HubSpot in their case) + GDPR/EU compliance (DPA Art. 28 included, EU infrastructure): zero technical workarounds, zero legal headaches.

The most common objections (and why they didn’t stop 40Factory)

B2B companies evaluating Linkly often arrive with the same four concerns. They’re worth addressing head-on.

”We already use the show’s app”

Apps provided by event organisers change with every show: different interfaces, different logins, different export formats. They’re unintuitive, they buckle under load (exactly during peak traffic), and none of them talk to your CRM. Result: three shows a year, three systems to learn, zero historical continuity on contacts.

Linkly is one tool, always the same, regardless of the show. The same interface at Hannover Messe, at SPS Parma, at a private event in Milan. Data flows into the same CRM, with the same structure, with the same history.

”We already have an internal system”

It happens: someone on the sales team has cobbled together an Excel sheet with macros, or an internal developer has improvised a script. It works, but it doesn’t scale: no AI parsing, no automatic enrichment, no instant follow-up, no consolidated analytics.

Linkly is a product, not a side project. Iterated on hundreds of rounds of feedback from companies that go to trade shows every month. Zero-effort setup: your Linkly account manager handles it. Building the same thing in-house costs 10x more, and six months later it already needs rebuilding.

”My sales reps aren’t digital — they prefer pen and paper”

This is the most common one. The rep on the show floor has their hands full: talking, shaking hands, exchanging cards, moving on to the next prospect. Asking them to type into a CRM is unrealistic.

With Linkly, the only thing the person at the show has to do is take a photo of the business card. No login, no form to fill out, nothing to remember. Photo and done. Everything else, parsing the card, enriching the data, qualifying the lead, sending the follow-up, updating the CRM, is handled by the AI agents orchestrated by the Linkly account manager. Setup, configuration, integration: all on us. The sales rep keeps doing what they do best.

”We don’t need it — we go to shows for branding”

Even when the stated goal is branding and visibility, spending tens of thousands of euros on stands, fit-out, and travel without measuring what comes back is a missed opportunity.

Linkly isn’t just about recovering contacts. It’s about having real visibility into the show:

• How many people visited the stand
• What roles and companies we met
• The demographic profile (sectors, company sizes, geographies) of the event’s actual audience
• What people talked about, what they asked questions on
• Which existing clients stopped by to say hello

With that data in hand, the end-of-season question “should we do this show again next year?” stops being a gut feeling and becomes a data-driven decision. It’s the same logic as branding: you can’t improve what you don’t measure.

Linkly is Soraia’s SaaS product dedicated to B2B trade shows and events.