While organizations around the world are spending billions of dollars on training, most of that investment is being wasted. Here’s what you can do to make sure your sales training initiatives add up to long-term results.

Have you ever observed a sales representative during a call and thought, “How can this be the same person who did so well during training? Why aren’t they doing what they were taught?”

They’ve been through the training and learned the skills—intellectually they know what they should do—but now that they’re back on the job, they’ve fallen into old habits and behaviors.

The fact is, this situation is more often the rule than the exception. Data collected by the consulting firm ES Research has shown that 85 to 90 percent of sales training fails to translate into a lasting improvement in productivity.

So what’s keeping the training from moving sales professionals from knowing to doing? Here are 4 of the most common reasons most sales training fails.