The customer was using cloudflare IP addresses, which is causing a knock-on effect for the rest of cloudflare’s customers and putting cloudflare as a business themselves at risk.

Right, so sales should not be involved in any way.

The alternative was for the customer to use their own IP addresses as cloudflare advised .

Again, sales should not have been involved in any way.

I’m not sure what you think ‘Business development’ teams do but I certainly wouldn’t be expecting engineering advice from them.

They are at least not identical to sales. They work with sales, but there's at least some engineering component of the job. In this case if you were told you were meeting with the business development team, you'd expect that there would be talk about an engineering solution to the problem. Not just paying cloudflare more money.