Sayer Martin and Josh Van Heukelom, leaders of Des Moines-based software startup Orchestrate, have spent the last seven years working together to simplify repetitive and evolving business processes for other organizations.
“We build applications specifically for use on the Salesforce Platform, primarily focused on financial services and historically the wealth-management space,” said Van Heukelom.
Orchestrate has already launched two products available on the Salesforce AppExchange, and later this quarter, they’ll be releasing a third product to enhance their available suite.
“Last year we came out with another application called Mix for document generation and financial forms population,” said Van Heukelom. “In the next few weeks, we’ll be releasing a third application called Pulse that’s centered around streamlining meeting scheduling.”
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Before founding Orchestrate, Van Heukelom was working as the Director of IT for Foster Group, a multi-billion dollar registered investment advisor in Des Moines.
“Foster Group got on Salesforce but couldn’t implement the business process automation that they wanted to,” said Martin. “Because they had someone like Josh on hand, they could build it themselves.”
While there, he met Martin, previously the founder of Sagacious Inc., a consulting and development firm focused on end-to-end Salesforce solutions for wealth management firms.
Process Composer was the first application they worked on together. It was built out of a pain-point for one firm, but Van Heukelom saw that it was more than a single firm solution and it had the potential to become an application. They placed it on the Salesforce AppExchange where they started gaining customers.
The two merged their technology businesses into Orchestrate in early 2016.
“One big benefit [of merging] is focus,” said Martin. “When we combined, we said that everything needs to be focused around product, even the consulting more focused around users of the applications, and now the applications.”
The founders said that out-of-the-box, Salesforce doesn’t allow users to take an entire business process and lay it out in a way that a team can use it and report on it. That’s where companies like Orchestrate come in.
“Similar to how Apple has an app store, Salesforce has AppExchange,” said Van Heukelom. “They build a core product, which is a CRM product, […] and provide this AppExchange to partners like us to sell our own applications on top of it.”
“Process Composer is a workflow automation tool that really supercharges what’s available inside of Salesforce,“ added Martin. “Anybody can go to the AppExchange and find us and install our applications.”
So far, over 1000 businesses have used Orchestrate’s applications.
“Our customer base varies from organizations that are five people to 3,000 people,” said Martin. “We build applications that can scale but also add value to a lot of different sized teams.”
Pulse will be the company’s next release and is coming soon to the AppExchange.
“When you’re trying to schedule with a team of people inside Salesforce, it’s really difficult to do that in a way that scales your time,” said Van Heukelom. “We’re reducing the number of clicks that it takes people to schedule meetings, and we’re helping them scale their business.”
Along with that release, the company will be focusing on selling and growing.
“We build very robust products so for us, one of our biggest strategic initiatives this year is hiring sales and marketing resources to get the word out about what we have, and the value prop on each of those products,” said Martin.
“Making the products work together even more so than they do today, and integration between our own products and ease of use [are also goals],” added Van Heukelom.
Orchestrate has made a lot of progress in the last two years, but Van Heukelom and Martin have set their sights higher.
“Our mission as a company is to enable best of breed operations for every organization on Salesforce,” said Martin. “We have one thousand-plus orgs that we work with on Salesforce, but Salesforce has 160,000 customers. We’re really just biting off a tiny bit at this point.”
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Christine McGuigan is the Managing Editor of Silicon Prairie News.
