Firms deploy an array of marketing communications (marcom) tools to influence sales performance, yet critics lament that such efforts can be incredibly inefficient. This research focuses on the impact of a range of marcom inputs on sales performance. It uses a multi-media data set assembled from four industry sources to examine the joint impact of paid media, earned media, and sales promotion activity. It does so through two Frontier meth-odologies (Stochastic Frontier (SFA) and Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA)) to benchmark sales performance. All firms within a single industry are compared to these sales performance benchmarks to generate a sales perfor-mance gap metric that pinpoints the most effective marcom activities. The results show that paid and earned media positively influence sales performance, however, excessive sales promotion activity has a negative effect. Several scenario analyses provide actionable strategic insights for managers to more efficiently allocate mar-keting communications efforts.