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The focus of this study is on the knowledge retention process, including knowledge capture, knowledge codification and the internalising of knowledge in organisations – a key aspect of age management. The purpose of this paper is to contribute to an understanding of the difficulties in this process to discuss implications for organizational measures to retain knowledge.

This study is based on field research on a Swedish multinational company from the perspective of senior employees.

The findings indicate that knowledge retention is a complex phenomenon, partly because valued knowledge is tacit and knowing is highly subjective and transferred through learning in collaboration with others in the process of undertaking assignments and acting together in work situations.

Knowledge retention is considered only from the perspective of senior, white-collar employees in this study; it would be of interest to consider other employees’ perspectives as well. A second limitation is that the data were collected at a single site. It could be argued, however, that a single case study research format provides an opportunity to gain deep knowledge and allows for explanations about observed phenomena, thereby contributing towards transferable scientific knowledge.

Knowledge retention is hindered by focusing solely on senior workers and on an explicit and commodified view of knowledge.

Knowledge retention should be an on-going way of working throughout the organization in which tacit knowledge and knowing are important.

This study shows the importance of considering knowledge and knowing retention as a matter of continual interaction between actors. Retention of tacit knowledge and knowing is not merely a matter of capturing and codifying knowledge. This study contributes to an understanding of the internalisation of tacit knowledge and knowing in continual interaction and cannot be preceded by a step-wise process.

This paper seeks to contribute to the discussion of relationship marketing in professional services firms (PSF). The process of dialogical interaction with clients is central to relationship marketing. However, client dialogue may fall dormant if not properly cultivated by employees of the PSF, that is, by professionals. This inductive study aims to investigate how professionals sustain a fruitful client dialogue by proactively introducing additional client problems to the dialogue.

Extensive field research with a “Big Four” accounting firm and 11 client companies inductively generates a framework to describe how professionals engage in proactive diagnosis of client problems to introduce these problems to the client dialogue. The framework is grounded in 49 focused interviews with professionals and client managers, as well as supplementary interviews, observations, and firm documents.

The suggested framework consists of the components of proactive diagnosis (information‐seeking and influence strategies), a trade‐off that professionals must make among these components, several enablers of and constraints on proactive diagnosis, and key client concerns that professionals must address to introduce additional client problems.

Despite the importance of client dialogue for relationship marketing, recommendations about how professionals can sustain client dialogue over time remain limited. This study describes proactive diagnosis as one potential approach. It contributes to literature on relationship marketing in PSFs by showing how proactive diagnosis helps professionals overcome the problem of dormancy in client dialogue, complements personal selling, and extends the role of diagnosis beyond paid client assignments into the pre‐selling phase.