Marketing events to healthcare professionals (HCP’s) is hard in ways most event marketers don’t fully anticipate until they’re already stuck.
You’re trying to reach people who are with patients all day, sitting behind multiple layers of office staff, often not on social media, and subject to compliance rules that limit how you can even talk to them.
Traci Stephenson has been working inside those constraints for years.
As Senior Event Marketing Manager at Henry Schein – one of the world’s largest distributors of healthcare products – she runs Thrive Live, the company’s flagship dental convention with over 100 speakers and courses.
In our latest Sevinar, Traci joins Rachel Stephan to walk through the specific tactics her team used to get busy clinicians to show up. Here are nine of them:
1. Treat your sales team like a marketing channel
When your audience is practically unreachable through digital, your field reps are the best thing you’ve got. They already have relationships. They’re already walking into dental offices every day.
Traci is direct about where the registrations actually come from:
“What we rely on heavily, at least in this industry, are our sales team, our field sales professionals. They’re going into offices every day, seeing their customers. They have their list of customers that they’re close with. That’s where we see the bulk of our registrations come from.”
Tactic: Build a sales enablement kit with sell sheets, slide decks, pricing guides, tier breakdowns and more. This gives sales reps everything they need to pitch attendance during an office visit without having to improvise.
Whatever you include, make sure it clears compliance review first. If there are restrictions on what can be handed to a clinician, your reps need materials that work within those rules, not around them.
2. Incentivize the sales team, not just the attendee
Getting reps equipped is one problem. Getting them to actually prioritize your event over everything else competing for their attention is another. At a company the size of Henry Schein, the sales team is pulled in a lot of directions.
Traci explains how her team keeps it front of mind:
“We incentivize them as well to say, okay, if you get x amount, you’ll actually get to go to Thrive Live. Or if you get x amount, you might get this bonus. By the end of the year, do this, or by this date, do that — and that helps to kind of get their focus.”
Tactic: Create milestone-based incentives tied to registration targets – event attendance, bonuses, exclusive perks that will keep reps focused throughout the campaign, not just at launch.
3. Acknowledge the gatekeeper — then market to them too
Here’s something most healthcare event marketers don’t want to admit: your email list probably isn’t full of doctors (aka the people you actually want to communicate directly with). Traci is candid about what this means in practice,
“Our list is really comprised of office managers and people that are buying for the office. Not necessarily the doctor or the dentist who I actually want to attend. So you have a lot of gatekeepers that we need to be cognizant of. I don’t think a lot of people realize that – they’re like, oh, just send an email, but you’re not sending it necessarily to who you want to.”
Tactic: Audit your database and identify what percentage of your contacts are actual clinicians versus administrative staff, then build separate messaging tracks for each. The gatekeeper often needs to be sold on the event before the decision-maker ever hears about it.
4. Give gatekeepers the words to make the case
Once you accept that office managers are a real step in your funnel, the move is to equip them, not just inform them. They need to be able to advocate for attendance, and most of them don’t have time to build that argument themselves. Traci’s team did something surprisingly simple.
“We actually made a piece that was a one-pager of ‘what to tell your boss so that you guys can go to Thrive Live.’ We have that kind of marketing.”
Tactic: Create a “convince your boss” one-pager tailored for the gatekeeper that covers ROI, learning outcomes, and the business case for attendance, so they can champion the event without starting from scratch.
5. Design the event for the whole office, not just the doctor
There’s a bigger opportunity buried in tactic four. If the event has something for the office manager and the hygienist, the gatekeeper stops being an obstacle and becomes a motivated promoter.
Traci says:
“Thrive Live is an event that has a lot for the team members as well. We have a lot of courses for office managers and hygienists. So there is a motivator for them to also go. A lot of trade shows like this, they’re really only for the doctor — so what’s the motivation for people to communicate?”
Tactic: When scoping your event program, consider building dedicated tracks or sessions for the broader office team. It multiplies your reasons-to-attend and gives administrative staff a personal stake in saying yes. Plus, it can help increase the overall size of your audience.
6. Don’t sleep on direct mail (and physical swag)
Email tends to get forgotten. Traci makes a case for why physical mail (surprise!) still belongs in the mix: it lands in the office where everyone can see it.
“People have kind of strayed from direct mail, but to us it works because it can land in the office. So everybody in the office can see it. We’ve done calendar magnets that will go on the fridge — things that will stay there. We’ve done post-its. We’ll either arm our salespeople with these things to bring in, or we’ll actually just send it directly to the office.”
Tactic: Add a direct mail component or physical swag items to your event promotion mix. Calendar magnets, save-the-date cards, branded desk items that stay visible after an email gets buried. Route them through reps for a warm hand-off, or mail directly to office addresses.
7. Use SMS – for your sales team and your prospects
Clinicians are heads-down with patients all day. SMS gets through in an intimate way that email can’t.
This is also why industry research now points to omnichannel engagement.
According to IQVIA’s HCP engagement trend for 2025:
“Marketers are integrating email with EHR messaging, referral tools, social media, and specialty platforms to create a seamless experience across HCP touchpoints.”
Traci’s approach reflects exactly that: email, SMS, direct mail, and rep outreach working together to improve the odds that your message is seen and acted on.
And SMS isn’t used only to reach out to prospects but also to keep the internal team moving.
Traci says: “We do a lot of SMS to the sales team also. And we even had a service where they could just text us the information for the customer that they wanted to register, and we had someone that was actually doing that and putting that in on the back end.”
Tactic: Run parallel SMS streams – one to prospects with event reminders, one to reps with updates and deadlines. And consider removing friction entirely: let reps text in a customer’s details and handle the registration yourself on the back end.
8. Partner with dental media and third-party lists to reach clinicians directly
All of the above helps you work smarter within your existing reach. But sometimes the honest answer is that your database doesn’t include the people you most need. For Henry Schein, whose contacts skew toward office buyers rather than dentists, that’s a structural reality.
“That’s why we tap into a lot of the third parties because they do have those dentist lists. Of course they have hygienists and everybody else we want, but at least we can get to the decision maker, the core health care professional there.”
Tactic: Find two or three dental media partners or association lists that reach your actual target audience, not just the office. Co-promote through their channels to get in front of the clinicians your own database can’t reach.
9. Activate speakers, exhibitors, and internal employees as peer-to-peer advocates
When direct reach has limits, you extend it through people whose networks are already full of exactly who you’re trying to reach. Traci’s team built a system around four stakeholder groups, each with their own referral track and tailored incentive.
“We try to tap into the exhibitors that are coming — ‘Hey, my company is exhibiting at Thrive Live.’ And even the speakers as well. A lot of people are following them because they want to learn. They know they’re the top people in this industry. And there’s still an untapped market within the Henry Schein ecosystem — even if I posted it to my social, you never know who’s following me, what doctors I’ve met throughout my time that then might see it.”
There’s also a reason this tactic lands differently in healthcare than in other industries. Snöball’s 2026 P2P Event Marketing Benchmark Report confirms what earlier tactics in this piece already point to: often in healthcare events doctors influence attendance, and administrators handle sign-ups. Clinicians are motivated by their peers, and your existing structure captures that interest.
For more insights, here’s how HCP-based events performed in peer-to-peer campaigns:
The incentives are calibrated to what each group actually cares about. Exhibitors respond to experiential rewards – Thrive Live has hosted entertainment nights headlined by Ray Romano and Kevin James, giving exhibitor advocates something genuinely worth talking about.
Speakers get personal referral links and a natural hook: “I’m speaking — come see me.” Internal employees get access to the event itself, with suite upgrades and celebrity meet-and-greets for top performers.
Tactic: Build a peer-to-peer marketing program with dedicated referral tracks for each stakeholder group. Tailor the incentive to what each group actually values, give them a personal referral link, and make participation as frictionless as possible.
Bottomline
The thing that makes Henry Schein’s approach worth studying is that every tactic has a specific reason to exist. Clinicians are hard to reach digitally, so field reps carry the load.
Compliance limits direct outreach, so gatekeepers become a deliberate part of the funnel. The database skews away from decision-makers, so third-party lists fill the gap. Personal networks are underutilized, so a structured peer-to-peer program puts them to work.
In short, here’s what Traci’s team does:
- Treat the sales team as a primary marketing channel
- Incentivize reps with milestone-based rewards tied to registration targets
- Acknowledge gatekeepers and build messaging tracks for them
- Equip gatekeepers with a “convince your boss” one-pager
- Design the event program for the whole office, not just the doctor
- Use direct mail and physical swag that stays visible in the office
- Run parallel SMS streams for both prospects and reps
- Partner with dental media and third-party lists to reach clinicians directly
- Activate speakers, exhibitors, and internal employees as peer-to-peer advocates
These nine tactics form a system built around one reality: you cannot market to healthcare professionals the way you market to any other audience.
To drive peer engagement, extend visibility, and grow registrations for Thrive Live, Henry Schein partnered with Snöball’s peer-to-peer event marketing solutions that turn speakers, exhibitors, sponsors, and internal teams into active advocates.
About Traci Stephenson
Traci Stephenson is a senior event and experiential marketing leader with 12+ years of experience driving event-led growth, sponsorship monetization, and integrated campaigns for enterprise and B2B organizations, including Nielsen and Henry Schein. Over her career, she has generated more than $75M in event-driven revenue and scaled Thrive Live – Henry Schein’s flagship dental convention – to over $39M in annual sales. She specializes in translating brand strategy into high-impact live experiences, with a particular focus on sales alignment, complex event ecosystems, and measurable results in compliance-sensitive industries.
Discover how Snöball helps healthcare event teams activate their speakers, exhibitors, and advocates to drive registrations from the clinical audiences that matter most.
