“6 AI agents that capture, qualify, and contact every lead from our trade shows.”

Context

40Factory is an Italian company specialising in Industrial IoT and AI solutions for manufacturing. They develop MAT (a scalable IoT platform for machine connectivity), Wilson.ai (industrial conversational agents), Sentra AI (video analytics for industrial processes), and provide strategic digital innovation consulting to OEMs and end-users of industrial machinery.

40Factory’s commercial model is built on consultative sales to machine builders and industrial operators, with a long sales cycle that demands direct contact with technical and commercial decision-makers. Industry B2B trade shows and events (Industry 4.0, industrial automation, OEM) are the primary prospecting channel.

The real problem

The post-show period was the weak link in the commercial funnel. The classic industry pattern:

• Business cards collected at the stand, piling up in boxes, card holders, or phone photos
• Manual CRM entry pushed back days after returning, with data inevitably incomplete or wrong
• Delayed follow-ups sent 7–10 days later, by which point the lead no longer remembers the conversation
• Lost qualification data: notes scribbled verbally or on cards never made it into structured fields
• Manual event reporting: hours in Excel to produce basic numbers (how many leads, from which sectors, with what intent)

The result: a significant share of contacts collected at shows was never recovered, and those that were recovered arrived too late in the funnel. Industry estimates cite 60% of trade show contacts lost and an average 9-day lag before the first follow-up.

What we built

40Factory adopted Linkly, a solution developed by the Soraia team that orchestrates 6 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 — generates a dynamic qualification form based 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 to act on.
5. Outreach Agent — sends a personalised follow-up email from the 40-factory.com domain within seconds of the conversation closing at the show, with brand-aligned tone and a CTA contextual to the lead’s role.
6. Analytics Agent — produces an 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.

Across all 6 agents, a dedicated Linkly consultant manages setup and individual events to ensure data quality and smooth 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.
• Follow-up email from their own domain: the lead receives the email from @40-factory.com, not a Linkly domain. Brand integrity preserved.
• 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 capturing 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. Discover how it works at linkly.events →