The voluntary business is thriving and will continue for the foreseeable future.

Last month we reviewed the voluntary industrys overall sales for 2012.

This is the last in our series of columns on the industry results for 2011.

The voluntary business is an important economic bellwether. It sounds plausible given that these are discretionary financial product purchases by large numbers of consumers.

In last months column, we looked at overall voluntary sales for 2010. In this edition, we analyze the results further by looking at product line sales as well as platform.

Eastbridge’s annual U.S. Worksite Sales Report for 2010 was recently released and, according to the findings, sales for the year were down compared to 2009. This is the first time since we have been tracking voluntary/worksite sales that we have seen a decrease from the prior year’s results.

Eastbridges annual U.S. Worksite Sales Report for 2010 was recently released and, according to the findings, sales for the year were down compared to 2009.

Last month, we talked about the impact of employee turnover and the amount of sales effort required to replace those losses. Our conclusion was that a basic conversion program helps brokers get off the attrition treadmill and use new account sales to grow the block rather than stay even.