B-to-B Dream Team 2025: Meet Kelsey Schneider -

Event Marketer’s 2025 B-to-B Dream has been unveiled. Each month, we’re sitting down with one of our all-stars to talk trends, best practices and all things uniquely b-to-b.

Kelsey Schneider, Global Event Manager, GE HealthCare

For Kelsey Schneider, experiential marketing has always been a numbers game. From the time she stepped into her role as a data and analytics specialist at GE HealthCare 11 years ago, to her current position as the company’s global event manager, Schneider’s penchant for quantifying and dissecting event ROI has been critical to advancing her career and moving the needle for the business.

Over the last decade, Schneider has transitioned from a trade show and events data analyst, to overseeing small events, to, now, managing 50 annual corporate events, including GE HealthCare’s 26,000-square-foot exhibit at the annual Radiology Society of North America (RSNA) show. And every last one of them is tracked and measured from every angle.

“From the very beginning, data and analytics has helped me and always been a massive piece of my decision-making, and it’s how I’ve been able to accelerate my career,” she says.

When Schneider first took on RSNA, the largest trade show on GE’s calendar, she overhauled the planning process and restructured and expanded the brand’s vendor partnerships, ultimately driving efficiencies by leaning on external support.

With the RSNA exhibit and related customer events under her wing, Schneider once again turned to data. By tapping into GE HealthCare’s own research, she determined that high-tech engagements and gamification weren’t resonating with the RSNA crowd. Rather than asking attendees to interact with holograms, for instance, Schneider focused on engaging them through more approachable tools, like touchscreen displays.

“When you think about putting VR headsets on and encouraging attendees to engage with content in that way, they can be a little bit more hesitant,” Schneider says. “So we’ve been utilizing different technology in order to show our content in a way that’s more engaging and approachable for them.”

On the measurement front, Schneider is a big advocate of rooting the strategy in the event’s objectives in order to determine the metrics that matter most. If the goal is to position the brand as an industry thought leader, she says, the KPIs will be very different from an event that’s aimed at lead generation. At trade shows, for example, heat-mapping is one of her go-to tactics, and one she says is often overlooked by other marketers.

“You can look at how you’re engaging with your customers through badge-scanning, but [heat mapping] also helps you to understand, more often, what products you see people gathering around and doing the demos,” she says. “You may not be scanning everyone’s badge, but that heat map tells you what products are actually standing out on the floor, and then you have that as another resource to help you next year when you go to that planning call.”

Of course, in the age of artificial intelligence, Schneider recognizes the power of leveraging AI to help streamline and maximize GE’s event data and performance metrics. But she’s also confident that the rapidly progressing technology will enhance, not replace, live events, particularly in the medical sector.

For one, attending in-person medical trade shows is a key component of earning continuing education credits. Just as important, she says, is the audience’s continued desire for hands-on collaboration and face-to-face networking. Medical professionals often attend events for the opportunity to compare notes and patient cases with one another, something she doesn’t see changing any time soon.

At the end of the day, Schneider is a true-blue experience builder who recognizes, and embraces, the fact that there are intense ups and downs that come with planning and executing high-caliber events. And she’s all in.

“It’s an adrenaline rush,” she explains. “You go through the ebbs and flows of it leading up to the event. You’re stressed. And then you get to the actual event, and it’s happening and you think, ‘I love this thing; it’s the best thing that’s ever happened… Let’s do it again.’”

Image credit: iStock/mycola