The power of talk: Exploring the effects of streamers’ linguistic styles on sales performance in B2B livestreaming commerce

•Theorizing and evaluating the role of streamers in B2B livestreaming commerce.•Streamer's linguistic style is a key driver of B2B livestreaming sales performance.•Propose a deep learning-based method to extract three speech acts of live streamers.•Assertive, expressive, and directive speech acts differentially affect online sales.•Product novelty and categories moderate the effectiveness of the three speech acts.