Edited: Thanks for the replies, everyone! You're all right, of course. I think I just needed a reality check. The sheer volume of these inquiries made me wonder if maybe this is just a normal way of doing business and maybe we needed to be more tolerant. Thank you all for confirming that these people are not worth our time and that I shouldn't feel bad for not allowing them to take up our time, as long as we keep it polite and professional.

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My company is very successful in a niche industry. We receive a large amount of inquiries from people and companies who want to work with us, but the overwhelming majority of these inquiries provide very little information before a call or meeting is requested. They usually talk a lot about how they like our product/services and the mission of their organization, but don't provide details about how they want to work with us. So we have no idea if they want to purchase product, work with us to create a product, sell us a product, be given product for free, etc. 

Since we do not have the time to schedule something with all of these people, we've started a process to filter people out. Before we will schedule a call, we have an admin ask them some reasonable and basic questions. Most of the time, I'd say 9 times out of 10, the person either completely ignores the questions or doesn't provide useful information when they answer them. At that point, we'll usually make up a reason why we're not able to take on new projects.

Questions

• Does anyone have any experience with this?
• Does it make sense to assume that anyone who cannot or will not be direct about what they want from us wouldn't be a good fit for a partnership anyway?
• Could there be valid reasons why a person or company would insist on scheduling a call with us, but also be unwilling to provide practical details about what they want to discuss?
• Is there a polite way to express to these people that we aren't going to speak with them unless they give us a decent idea of what they want to discuss first.