I use eclipse STS, so the maven plugin comes pre-installed. However, if you aren’t using STS (Springsource Tool Suite), you can still install the m2Eclipse plugin. Here is the link:
http://www.eclipse.org/m2e/
Once you have this installed, you should be able to run all the maven commands. To do so, from the package explorer, you would right click on either the maven project or the pom.xml in the maven project, highlight Run As, then click Maven Install.
Hope this helped.