If your company attends trade shows, you know the challenge: hundreds of new leads, dozens of products, and the pressure to follow up quickly with personalized messages.

Traditionally, businesses rely on either:

• Sending a generic mass email with minimal personalization, or

• Having the sales team manually craft emails one by one — an enormous time sink.

But with the rise of AI automation platforms, there’s a better way. Enter n8n.

What Is n8n?

n8n (pronounced “n-eight-n”) is an open-source workflow automation tool, similar to Zapier or Make. The key difference:

• It can be self-hosted locally — even on a Raspberry Pi — giving you full control over your data.

• It integrates seamlessly with AI models and vector databases, making it the perfect foundation for next-generation business automation.

This combination of low-code workflow design and powerful AI integration is why n8n has been one of the most hyped automation tools in the past 12 months.

Real-World Case: Automating Trade Show Follow-Up

We worked with a European company that came back from a trade show with:

• 20+ products

• Hundreds of leads across Europe

• Notes from each customer interaction

Instead of wasting weeks on manual outreach, we built a single n8n workflow that automated the entire after-show process.

Step 1: Build a Product Knowledge Base

• All brochures and PDFs were processed with OCR (Optical Character Recognition)

• The extracted text was stored in a vector database (Supabase / Pinecone)

• This made the product data searchable and AI-ready

Step 2: Enrich Each Lead Automatically

• Leads were pulled from HubSpot CRM

• The workflow extracted domains from each lead’s email

• The company websites were scraped for “About Us” content and unique value propositions (USPs)

Step 3: AI-Powered Personalization with RAG

Using Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), n8n combined:

• The customer’s notes from the trade show

• Their website claims and positioning

• Relevant product data from the PDFs

The result: personalized draft emails that looked like they were written one by one by the sales team.

Step 4: Draft and Review

Instead of blasting emails automatically, the workflow:

• Created highly personalized drafts

• Let the sales team review and approve before sending

This ensured quality and gave the team confidence, while saving dozens of hours of manual work.

Why n8n + AI Is a Game-Changer

• Scalable personalization: Every lead gets an individual email

• Data ownership: Run n8n locally, keep sensitive lead data in-house

• Integration-friendly: Works with HubSpot, Google Drive, Supabase, Pinecone, Gmail, and more

• Future-proof: Easily adapt workflows for new products, markets, or AI models

Conclusion

n8n is more than an automation tool — it’s the bridge between structured data, unstructured documents, and AI reasoning.

If you want to scale your trade show lead follow-up, customer engagement, or sales outreach without overwhelming your team, AI-powered workflows with n8n are the way forward.

👉 Contact us at OT Consulting to explore how we can design n8n workflows for your business.