Unlocking crowdfunding success by leveraging selling perspectives and influence tactics for optimal performance

Selling is essential to entrepreneurial businesses, but research on the integration of selling and entrepreneurship is largely under-conceptualized. By integrating influence tactics theory for effective selling with the dual processing model, this research theorizes that influence tactics help crowdfunders form an intuition when evaluating crowdfunding projects. However, the effectiveness of influence tactics on crowdfunding performance depends on analytic thinking triggered by entrepreneurs’ previous crowdfunding experience. Using data from 43,613 projects on Kickstarter, we constructed new measures for influence tactics using the BERT model. The empirical results generally support our conceptual framework of the interactions between influence tactics and entrepreneurs’ crowdfunding experience on fundraising performance.