Billions of dollars are invested into sales training every year. With more informed customers, fiercer competition, the rate of introduction of new products into the marketplace higher than ever; the need for effective sales training has never been more important. Yet, we continue to see a desire to cut training expenses and, now more than ever, the cry to reduce the time that sales people are “out of the field”. It really should be no surprise that there is a continual need to defend sales training investments as the return from such investments is frequently hard to quantify and often disappointing. With this as the backdrop, we embarked on a research study of how sales training can better provide the expected business result. The result is ASTD's Strategic Alignment Model for Sales Training.