Driving voluntary sales

This is the last in our series of columns on the industry results for 2013. The first article looked at overall voluntary sales for 2013, and the second shared sales by product and platform. This final article spotlights sales by distribution segment.

Total voluntary sales for 2013, according to our annual U.S. Worksite/Voluntary Sales Report, were $6.644 billion. Benefit brokers continued to lead the way in driving the sales increases. The segment generated about $3.76 billion in new voluntary sales and saw their share of the market increase again from 56 percent in 2013 to 57 percent this year. Over the past 10 years, benefit brokers have increased their share of total sales from 41 percent (in 2003) to the current 57 percent.

As seen in the past, career agents had the second highest share at 19 percent, but this share decreased from 21 percent in 2012 and is down from 26 percent 10 years ago.