This error indicates that you tried to execute a goal which requires a POM but Maven didn't find a pom.xml file in the directory you invoked it from. In most cases, fixing this is merely a matter of changing the current directory in the command prompt to point at your project's base directory. If you don't want to change the current directory, you have to tell Maven explicitly where the POM to build resides like this:
mvn -f path/to/pom.xml <goals> ...