You should be out with referral sources. These lunches, breakfasts, and coffees should be happening on a weekly basis. If they’re not, then you know what you need to do.

Usually, these meetings are going to be enjoyable. Sometimes they’re totally energizing.

On some occasions, however, these meetings are miserable.

One time, I was at lunch with an accountant. He was boring. I nearly drifted off to sleep, and that happened before the food came.

I’m not kidding. He was really boring. It was funny because I’ve been to lunch with a bunch of accountants. They’re a tough group. Mostly they’re pleasant enough, but they skew toward introverted.

It’s not uncommon for me to have trouble finding a topic that energizes them. I go hunting for their interests so I can ask questions, and I run into one-word answers.

“What do you enjoy doing in your free time?” I ask. “Reading” is the response. Uh oh, this is going to be a long lunch.

Back to the story about Mr. Boring. He wasn’t a one-word answer guy. He was billions and billions of words answer guy. I asked one question—something innocuous like “How are you?”—and we were off to the races. Of course, we were at the really, really boring races.

He went on and on droning and droning. I started to have an out-of-body experience. I found myself at the table across from us watching myself have lunch with this guy. I was in the Twilight Zone.

I barely made it through lunch.

Once I was back at the office, I started to put the guy into our follow-up system. We write a note and send it, then we follow up at 30 and 60 days before scheduling the next meeting.

As I entered his info, my body felt a sense of dread as I imagined the next lunch.

What to do?

Easy.

Drop him. Don’t put him in the system, don’t follow up, and don’t ever, ever go to lunch with him again.

It’s okay. You’re not going to like every prospective referral source. You don’t need to keep everyone on your list. You can move on to someone else. There are more than enough prospects out there.

Once I realized that I could just drop him, I started to feel the energy return. I started to smile. I was filled with relief.

You aren’t going to like every referral source. Don’t worry about it. If you make yourself miserable with marketing, you aren’t going to do it. It’s more important to stay in the game than it is to win with any particular referral source.

Keep marketing.