Setting System Properties for the maven-surefire-plugin via CLI

I am currently working on a use-case where I have to set a system property for the maven-surefire-plugin via command line. I've tried to use the systemPropertiesFile property but it seems like my build doesn't pick up the properties in the file . Here's the syntax that I've tried:

mvn install -DsystemPropertiesFile=<path-to-file>

I'm using Maven 3.0.5 for this. Setting the same property via the POM file works fine, but unfortunately that is not a solution I can use. Am I missing something?