Respectfully, the experience you outline above is a routine example of sales hackery. Does it not ideally underscore precisely why startups/tech orgs strategically error in their woeful sales hiring protocols?
I don't hate sales people and think they provide a valuable service many engineers would rather not have to deal with; but the hyper-competitiveness of many sales folk optimizes for a zero-sum scarcity paradigm that is often in tension with what motivates engineering types.