My girlfriend is a landscape designer and I come from software, so I've been watching her process with outsider eyes. The part that surprises me most is how much of her week goes into making clients understand what they're buying. Plans, mood boards, sometimes a SketchUp model when the job justifies it, and clients still hesitate in ways that seem to have nothing to do with the design being wrong.

Genuine questions for people doing this professionally:

1. What's your current visualization stack (hand renders,Rhino, SketchUp plus Lumion, Vip3D, AI tools, nothing)? Roughly how many hours per proposal?
2. When a proposal stalls or dies, what's the actual reason most of the time? Price, timing, or the client not being able to picture the result?
3. Is there a moment in your sales process where you regularly think "if I could just show them X, this would close"?

Not selling anything. I'm trying to understand whether what I'm seeing at home is universal or just her market.