Or “your sales guy is making a little backup of the leads from the CRM before handing in notice”.

Though with sales orgs I think this is almost an expected practice - sales people are often hired on the tactit, never officially acknowledged basis that they will bring their leads list.

Years ago I got a job through a recruiter, left company A for B. She called me after a few months and asked me for the Compsny A internal directory - which I declined to provide and she got kind of nasty about it. Maybe ten years later I was at company C and my manager mentioned hiring a recruiter - same person. I mentioned our previous interaction (not out of spite, just a naive narrative) and they stopped working with her immediately. My point being - your behavior has a long tail, so don’t be trying to take advantage.

People asking for company directories amuses me so much, especially when most company email patterns are completely guessable.

it's more the name and the org chart?

maybe the phone number too