I am able to compile and start my Spring project using Maven:
mvn -e clean compile exec:java -Dexec.mainClass=de.fraunhofer.fkie.tet.vmware.manager.Test
What spring dependencies do you have in your pom? You may get xml parsing errors due to some spring jar files not being on the class path. In spring 3 the library was split up into many jar files. Check out this post to see what you need, specifically:
org.springframework
spring-context
${org.springframework.version}