In the wake of last year’s financial collapse—where cash is now king and credit stuck in the dungeon—the most important person in the room come deal time might also be the one who is most maligned: the business development exec.

Coming from a background in traditional media—reporting for newspapers, magazines, and a small stint in TV—when I landed at a digital media startup, Lou Dobbs’ SPACE.com in 1999, I didn’t know what to make of the “biz dev” people: They seemed like a lot of freshly minted MBAs or lawyers who wandered the executive offices of other like-minded startups working their calculators and spreadsheets into a frenzy of drool-inducing numbers.

Once, in 2006, in a meeting with a potential content-sharing partner, I watched in horror/amazement as our biz dev lead outlined plans to take over the management of the publisher’s web site. Their negotiating team was dumbstruck. They just wanted someone to fill editorial holes in their space and astronomy coverage.

When our guy was finished with his presentation, I calmly turned to our hosts and said: “We’re actually not going to do any of that.” Later, as we left the building, I asked our biz dev guy what the hell he thought he was doing. He brushed me off: “It’s just business. You’ve go to think on your feet.”

I didn’t quite realize it at the time, but I’d stumbled upon what Joseph Lassiter, a professor of management practice at Harvard Business School, describes as a business development cliché. The best business development people, says Lassiter, are “basically sales guys on steroids” who evolve with the times, and the really good ones are people with an eye for identifying potential partnerships and value.

“Right now, biz dev people are looking for soft targets,” says Kathryn Harrigan, a professor at the Columbia Business School. “Oftentimes that is a very useful way to put a company into an investment, frequently they can own a company by buying distressed debt, like vulture capitalists.”

Business development as a job title is a relatively new field, having been part of the professional vernacular for the past 20 or so years. For some companies business development can mean sales, for others, corporate partnerships, while some businesses still see it only as an M&A role.

The goal right now for biz dev executives is to keep their networking tools alive, says Michael Liersch, who teaches at NYU's Stern School of Business: “You need to keep your eyes open for opportunities because, when things improve, the winners are going to be those who can hit the ground running when the markets free up.”

The business development position changes during an economic cycle, as well as over the lifetime of a company, Lassiter says. Ultimately, it’s about identifying and creating partnerships. “You send the business development people to find partners that you need to get a group of new customers or a group of new products you need for the customers you already have.”

However, during the boom years “so many companies were merging and being sold, it empowered the business development function and CEOs became dependent on the role,” says one serial entrepreneur who has spent his career in both traditional and new media but who spoke about his trade on the condition of anonymity.

Having created, bought, and sold various companies, his take on the average biz dev person isn’t flattering. “How many of those deals actually succeed? Something in my mind tells me that those guys have a very low batting average in terms of originating deals.”