TORONTO (Dow Jones)–If you can’t find them, buy them.

For some Canadian financial advisers, winning new accounts at a time when it’s hard to retain old ones could mean paying to purchase business leads.

Between August and January, when the markets were extremely volatile, more financial advisers started to purchase leads to potential clients who had expressed interest to see a financial adviser or an expert about their investments, mortgages, insurance, and other financial-services needs.

ProfessionalReferrals.ca, a fee-based service that connects industry professionals with prospective clients in Canada (and in the U.S. at AdvisorWorld.com), has seen 70 new advisers a month sign up to purchase business leads, or to simply post their marketing tools on the site. That’s up from the usual traffic of 20 new brokers a month.

Galen Weston, president of ProfessionalReferrals.ca, said 70% of these registrants are from Canada, with the rest from the U.S. In terms of clients looking for advisers to talk to, the traffic has increased from August to January by 400%, to 1,800 a month, Weston said.

Weston isn’t related to the family that controls George Weston Ltd. (WN.T).

The surge in traffic at ProfessionalReferrals.ca emphasizes how brokers have started to use non-traditional ways to gather new clients, such as purchasing leads or signing up for Web-based services.

Typically, financial advisers - some of whom offer insurance services in Canada - use marketing tactics such as mailing out market information, and going to seminars, conferences, luncheons, and other networking events to find potential customers.

“The leads are very important because I’m finding in my own practice that people don’t just walk in the door looking for an adviser,” said Caroline de Lennoy Davies, who has been a financial adviser for 11 years and has recently started working as an associate agent at Country Hills Insurance Financial Services Inc. in Calgary.

One Lead Generated C$19,000 In Commissions

Davies has been buying business leads for the past three years, focusing on clients looking for illness and disability protection, her specialty. One of her purchased leads generated more than C$19,000 in commissions last year from a marathon runner who was looking for illness and disability protection and had some investments as well. “I’ve been quite fortunate with a lot of my leads,” Davies said.

But some advisers aren’t signing up at Web-based services just to find potential clients. Christian Farstad, a wealth adviser at Bank of Nova Scotia’s (BNS) ScotiaMcLeod unit, signed up less than a month ago simply to put his profile and some articles he’s written on ProfessionalReferrals.ca.

His aim is to gain exposure to clients who are looking for a financial adviser, and he hopes to get business leads from clients who are logging into the site. This supplements Farstad’s Web site at ScotiaMcLeod, which details his investment philosophy and service approach to investment planning. He said he is open to buying business leads, depending on how his Web exposure pans out.

Not all leads translate to actual business. Weston of ProfessionalReferrals.ca says an average of three out of 10 leads result in a business transaction, and brokers have to pay a fee for every lead.

The prices range from as low as C$6 per lead for people seeking an executor of an estate, to C$100 for requests for a quote for individual and group employee benefits from companies, according to the ProfessionalReferrals.ca web site. Requests for a new financial/estate adviser or planner generally cost C$85 per lead and the leads show the size of the potential client’s portfolio, geographic location, kind of advisory services sought, and other details.

“You are going to get some duds,” said Davies of Country Hills. But once a good client signs on, she said “that more than makes up for the bad ones.”