What they built with UserEvidence
Siana inherited a fragmented reference process with no single owner across most of Carta’s business units, slow reference matching, and no closed-loop tracking.
She started by auditing every existing process and interviewing the people running it, then gathered baseline data to measure against later. To establish buy-in from the start, Siana hosted a sales focus group — getting all the key leaders in one room, running a sales survey, and conducting one-on-one interviews with early adopters. The goal: “We hear you and we want to build together,” rather than building a program in isolation.
Step one: centralize. Siana funneled every reference request into a single intake channel on Slack. Here, sales reps could request a reference in natural language including details such as job title, products used, location, and more, making it easy to track all requests in one spot.
Then, she launched the revamped program company-wide with an in-person enablement roadshow, including a kiosk at sales kickoff where reps could demo submitting a request themselves. To treat it as a continuous launch event, when a rep submitted a request early on, Siana would follow up directly: “How was that for you? Any kinks?” And then when UserEvidence shipped features that addressed that feedback, she’d highlight them in the next enablement session and collect internal testimonials from sellers along the way.
Siana now runs reference matching through a mix of UserEvidence and Claude, using Claude to check call recording sentiment and scan Slack for any signs of a negative customer experience before ever proposing someone for a reference call. She arrives at each CSM conversation already armed with a recommendation based on data.
👀 Want to see how reference matching in UserEvidence works? Take a quick tour →
The impact & results
In Q2 alone, the team handled over 50 reference requests, drawing on roughly 70+ unique references. They’ve reached an 80% seller adoption rate across key business units, cut time to reference match by 67% (from six days down to two), and increased reference call completion rate by 66% through closed-loop tracking.
Siana’s advice to peers: buy-in never stops, so keep sharing small wins internally and externally to keep the momentum going.
