For years, my old firm struggled with marketing — which meant something different to every partner. Finally, in 2007, the confusion was clarified and our marketing efforts actually made sense through the leadership of our new CMO, Jeff Antaya.

I had been asked to be part of the interviewing team, and I liked him a lot — so much so that I wasn’t sure he knew what he was getting himself into, and I recommended he not take the job. I told him that many of my colleagues thought they were marketing gurus, they didn’t agree with one another, and they would make his job and life miserable by constantly second-guessing him (sorry if I’m offending anyone, but that probably includes me). I was so persuasive that he took the job anyway — fortunately for Plante Moran and me.

I just finished reading his first book, Don’t Ride a Dinosaur into Your Battle for New Clients (Dinosaur). He does an amazing job of covering all the major marketing areas and providing logical, practical tactics for a complicated, confusing, nebulous subject. If you’re a business owner, CEO, COO, CMO, or any other C-person of a B2B company responsible for marketing, I would highly recommend Dinosaur.

Antaya lays out a comprehensive outline of everything you need to consider in very few words. He shares non-hedged advice, great lessons-learned stories, and very practical suggestions with a touch of his humility, for which I can vouch. I found it very refreshing. For those who have read my book, Hunter Extraordinaire, you know I acknowledged in Chapter 9 that I hadn’t covered digital/technology tools and was planning to add them in the next version. After reading Dinosaur, I’d be embarrassed to even make an attempt. Antaya not only knows his subject deeply, but he lived through the digital implementation at Plante Moran for 13 years.

Like my last three books, I would consider Dinosaur a field manual for marketing, and I would suggest keeping it close by for easy reference. Antaya has provided a very detailed table of contents; short, very specific chapters; very distinct paragraph headings; lots of lists; and 13 useful tools (you’ll find those in the appendix).

Here are just a few examples of the subjects upon which Antaya offers advice:

1. Hiring, compensating, and managing new business developers (Hunters).
2. How to digitally maximize and evaluate your content marketing/inbound sales effectiveness (he calls it thought leadership).
3. Lots of ideas on how to measure marketing effectiveness. Antaya brings objective measurement to subjective activities.
4. He shares his positions on print advertising; radio advertising; public relations; trade shows, including booths; and many other subjects.

Antaya blends his four decades of real-world experience with the best, most practical millennial digital tools. He accomplished this in a very complex environment that had been described by a previous marketing director as a Rubik’s Cube of Industries, Services, and Geographies.

I’m glad he didn’t listen to my advice, joined Plante Moran, and now has written Dinosaur, which I’m sure I’ll use with many of my clients.